is there a way to preview your terrain shader in Radiant?

(rgoer) #1

Is there a way to preview your terrain metashader in Radiant? I know I can use EasyGen and such to view my alphamap (and even the texture blending), but can you do it in Radiant? I’ve built a terrain for a town I’m working on, and I textured the roads right into the terrain in EasyGen. Now I can’t see where I put my roads and stuff, and I’m getting frustrated…

(evillair) #2

As far as I know you can’t.

(redfella) #3

ditto

(rgoer) #4

Yeah, the best thing I’ve been able to come up with so far is just noclip-spectating my map, turning cg_draw2d off and taking a screenshot of the terrain from above (trying to line the camera up as “orthogonally” as possible can be a bit of a pain), then using that screenshot as a temporary texture applied to my terrain surface. Still, what a pain in the ass–maybe if enough of us email bugzilla the GTKRadiant developers will think about adding a “load .pcx” option? Even viewing the .pcx file would give me more info than I currently get…

(SCDS_reyalP) #5

Terrain preview would be a nice feature.

So would being able to use an arbitrary image as the background of your 2d views. There is already a bug for this:
http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=88
No activity for a long time. Doesn’t seem like it should be too hard to implement…

(SCDS_reyalP) #6


:moo:

:bump:

(chavo_one) #7

Is this a screenshot of 1.3.12, or are you just on the in? :poke:

(rgoer) #8

Hey, share the wealth–how’d you do that? :moo:

(SCDS_reyalP) #9

1.3.12-reyalp :stuck_out_tongue:

A plugin I’m working actually, still needs some UI and cleanup before I can give it out.

Basically, you choose an image to use as a background, and select 1 or more brushes to set its size. Then it is blended with whatever is in the 2d window (currently just XY, but it will be trivial to have it in other views as well)

It would be nice to do it as a true background, rather than a blend, but as far as I can tell, that would mean changing the radiant core, rather than just making a plugin.

I will probably make it so it can get the image size automagically from the mapcoordsmins / mapcoordsmaxs of your worldspawn.

The obvious use is to have your command map as a background/overlay while you are working. You could also use your alpha map, and just select your terrain to set the background size/location.

Anyhow, once I have a version that doesn’t require re-compiling to change the image, I’ll be looking for some beta testers :smiley:

(rgoer) #10

Well, whenever that time comes, you can sign my ass right up. This looks potentially sexy.

(Obli) #11

Any news on your plugin, reyalp? :smiley:

(MindLink) #12

It’s integrated in 1.4.0 afaik.

(SCDS_reyalP) #13

Yup. :moo:

(MadJack) #14

hmmmmm… no terrain in my 1.4.0 ET unless it’s hidden somewhere :???:

(SCDS_reyalP) #15

Filters ?

Oh, and it might not be clear since I took the image from that old post down, but the plugin just lets you overlay an image on your 2d background, it doesn’t show you your terrain shaders. If the image is your alpha map, it still help you see what is going on.

(MadJack) #16

Ahhh I understand now. Yeah, no terrain is textured but the terrain brushes are there.

As for the background picture, I remember trying to use it when I started ebe and it wasn’t working. Nothing was displayed but it was probably me who screwed up. Next time I’ll know who to complain to :wink: lol

(Shallow) #17

Could have been a problem with the image you chose. Since the normal Radiant texture loading modules must be used for the background plugin, it needs to follow most of the same rules as level textures, i.e. tga/jpeg, powers of 2, stored in your ET dir.

(SCDS_reyalP) #18

Also, there was a bug discovered that could cause image loading to fail, perhaps depending on how you entered the game path at install time:

Hey you hit the nail on the head! The et.game file read
"enginepath =“C:\Program Files\Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory\ /”

So I changed it to:

enginepath =“C:\Program Files\Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory/”

and it worked great. I know a few people who have had the same problem,
not sure why the file is generated that way but at least we can fix it.
Thanks for the help!!

So if the plugin fails loading all image files, check your .game file. Unfortunately, the plugin has to go through some contortions to use radiants image library. If you do find you need to edit the .game file, make sure to make a backup first.

(MadJack) #19

@ Shallow, Hmmmm… I didn’t know about the requisites. I didn’t expect the plugin to use radiant’s way of using images and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t using power of 2 sized images. That’s good to know for next time.

@ rayalP, Noted. The images were not giving any errors. That’s what was puzzling me. It was saying it was loaded (can’t remember exact msg) but nothing was displayed. So I guess it’s the power of 2 prob.

(SCDS_reyalP) #20

The plugin (and radiant) do fine with non-power of two images. You do need to enable display of the image. Slightly outdated readme: https://zerowing.idsoftware.com:666/viewsvn/GtkRadiant/trunk/contrib/bkgrnd2d/readme_bkgrnd2d-b0.25.txt?rev=4142&view=markup

The console should spew various diagnostic information when you try to load an image.