FATE - a user-friendly alternative to EasyGen

#21

Where’s the “New map” button? I think I didn’t find one.

(kamikazee) #22

On the screenshot it’s still there, but it could be called ‘Generate’ now IIRC.

(kamikazee) #23

[quote=]UBC[ McNite]

new trangluar mesh and much smaller divides terrain realy does look much more natural

= tons of tris, so be careful when creating the larger outdoor maps

From the screenies I m not happy with the mesh because with the old cube-split-diagonally-mesh you could easily cut triangles and adjust them to your brushwork/ have different triangle-sizes in your map according to your needs. This will be a lot more difficult to acchieve with this honeycomb-pattern imo, but i ll try it out anyways.

I ll have a look at it tonight, but I think it will be a real substitute for EasyGen only when it features .map-import and then exports the terrain as brushes. You really need that to adapt the terrain to your brushwork.[/quote]
If you used large tris to make the terrain, you can easily cut them up in Radiant. Merging them will be far more comlex though…

(Speculative:)
I peeked into the format used by this program to save files, and it seems it should be possible to split faces directly in the editor, just by adding a point in the middle of 2 tris and adding 2 edges Of course, you would get divided rectangles.
If it would be necessary, this program could generate and work with old-fashioned divided square’s, as I think it operates on vertexes and not on a fixed x,y grid with each vertex simply a height value.
Allso note that this program could support a rotation and scaling too for editing the tris and aligning them to the slope.

One thing for sure: it allready exports .map files. Only importing them ain’t done yet. And if this other things I mentioned here will be looked at is not sure.

(CooperHawkes) #24

@carnage: If I got you right, then the smoothing function I planned will do exactly what you are looking for. In the meantime you might play around with the “Subdivision” button, which gives you some sort of smoothing the brute force way by adding loads of new triangles :wink: (yes, I know, that’s not what you meant with blur)
Flattening and locking are some nice features… I will add them to my ToDo list.

@kamikazee: nice ideas… I will take them into account.
Your speculations are correct. TBH I thought about adding an option to create x/y grid based meshes, but I dumped that idea because I thought “noone will use it anyway ;-)”

@McNite: high poly terrain won’t be a problem any longer in the future if I get the simplification routines running… have a look at the ToDo list ;-p
The upcoming simplification of flat areas is one of the reasons why I put “adaptive” in the title string of the tool :wink:

… and now I’m off until saturday :frowning:

(Loffy) #25

Hi!
I get an error message when I export the file to map format:
“Error updating shaderlist.txt. Unable to find shaderlist.txt! Please add the following lines manually: fate_alphascale test_fate.”
I wonder if it is a real error.
I have added those shaders to the shaderlist.txt.
//Loffy

(Pytox) #26

Is it possible to also import Easygen files? :slight_smile:

(kamikazee) #27

Why should it?
Map importing isn’t supported yet, but it allows to do more then Easygen alone.

(carnage) #28

i cant even see why you would want to. this tool is pre alpha and imo already better than easygen

nice to see the authour taking features that the comunity would like to see too. i can w8 to get my hands on the final version

(Pytox) #29

Hmm, but it could be good for old projects you made before so you can load them in Fate :slight_smile: :banana:

(kamikazee) #30

But you’ll still have the map file there, so importing native Easygen files remains useless.

(Smilie) #31

seeing this nice prog makes me wanna try one last time at ET mapping :clap:

(Loffy) #32

I tried it again yesterday and it an amazing tool.
The first thing I do when I get the map-file into radiant, is to press “1” to reduce the scale of the grid in the editor 2D window.
Then I selected everything (“i”) and hit Ctrl + G. I think that is “snap everything to grid”.
Why? Somehow I “feel” that snapping brushes to grid is a good think. Although I’m not sure here, in this case. Your comments on that one?
Then I tossed in some entities and compiled. There where alot of sparklies in the map. Anyone else having lots of sparklies in their FATE-generated terrain?
Some hills looked like crap, but some turned out really nice. I guess working with FATE will invoke wokring in small steps, saving, exporting map file, then trials, then reworking terrain again (in FATE) and so on.
//L.

(kamikazee) #33

The sparklies may come from aligning to the grid…
I haven’t really checked any map, but I’ll do that tonight.

(sodsm live) #34

i haven’t had a chance to try it(eagerly awaiting the linux version). from the screenies and comments, it sounds awesome. i was kinda worried when i saw the first screenshot and realized it was for windwos but then i perked up with the news of a linux alpha on the way.

does anyone have a small .map they could send me so i can get a better look at what this thing can do while i wait? it doesn’t have to be perfectly tweaked or textured, just a little sampling.

keep up the good work CooperHawkes :drink:

(kamikazee) #35

Technically, I believe it uses Open Source libraries that should be easy obtainable in Linux.
I hope he can fix the portability issues… (Some things like file handling without streams are not directly portable if you use OS calls, or if write code for a not-so-standard compiler like Borland)

Having the editor under Linux would be great, then I’m not stuck to Windows anymore for building terrains.

(EB) #36

Is there a benefit to this ? …or is it a favorite flavor type thing ?

(kamikazee) #37

It is possible to run under Linux, as all the GTK library he uses are to be found in the GNU Open Source project. Problems may be in certain OS function calls, or third party libraries.

Having a Linux version would have the benefit that GTKRadiant, FATE and ET could all be used under Linux so one doesn’t need to change to Windows to run Easygen, for example. Linux is slightly faster and responsive then Windows, but it remains mainly a ‘favourite’ thing.

(]UBC[ McNite) #38

@ Loffy:

I think its absolutely necessary to do the snap-to-grid thing because vertexes not being right on a grid can screw up map and/or compile time if you got too many of them. They can even lead to safe_malloc failures due to needing too much RAM in the LIGHT stage.
It is necessary for terrain exported from EasyGen too btw. And iirc sock recommended the snap-to-grid somewhere (that s why I did it in the first place).

Although I use grid4 for terrain, any smaller isn’t useful for adjusting manually anyways.
If you used grid1, that may indeed be the reason for sparklies. Try again with a larger grid… then you ll see whether they r still around and whether they result from snap-to-grid.

(EB) #39

…I am new to ‘desktop linux’ with the arrival of the new version of Ubuntu. (curiosity follows me)

BACK TO TOPIC

(=PoW= Kernel 2.6.5) #40

I see the Linux version is under development. Thanks for not leaving us Linux only mappers out.

Keep up the great work.