Close to giving up trying to map with MOHradiant/Easygen

Oddball_Woof · Post by **Oddball_Woof** » Tue Aug 06, 2002 10:03 am

My mapping nightmares continue I can seem to make no progress every step is a 1 grid size and requires endless debugging, each debug brings up new problems.
Currently I have tried using Easygen to create a Terrain, it created a mess of errors, tiny portals a real pain to fix.
Brushes aren't exactly aligned, how is it Radiant and Easygen can create brushes of less than a wholw number gridsize ? Well I got it to a stage that it compiles and loads at last only to find the meta shader it created didn't work no textures at all so by hand I recalked and textured the whole map replacing many flat area with single rectangle brushes to help debugging so I can find stuff...... more debugging and........ Now the terrain isn't lit!
The world spawn values are there, a grid size, I went back to Radiant and switched to 'real lighting' and yes the textures go black nothing I can do makes them appear, oddly the patches are visible I created using LOD, with real light off everything is visble just fine. I deleted any reference to the original easygen generated stuff such as the shaders, the alpha map, after all now I had redone the whole map by hand now.
Still nothing, I have no idea what to do now..... start again? a months wasted effort, including the fixing of windows 3 times, including a full reinstall due to crashes caused by the tools!
This was how it looked before I recaulked and deleted the metashader...

Now....

Any ideas what might be going on?
Cheers Oddball

McBa1n · Post by **McBa1n** » Tue Aug 06, 2002 2:31 pm

OI!
I have had similar problems and just restarted out of pure frustration - testing carefully along the way

Anytime you toss in terrain, you're looking for a LOT of headaches...
Sheesh, wish I knew how to fix your problems, but from one mapper to another, I wanted to say : I feel your pain:/

-McBain
Day of Days Mod

Oddball_Woof · Post by **Oddball_Woof** » Tue Aug 06, 2002 5:02 pm

Thanks dude.......mapping with Radaint retetxure the haie on your head a wonderful grey.
Also what keeps happening to my images they disappear on the forum...ummm

Oddball_Woof · Post by **Oddball_Woof** » Tue Aug 06, 2002 5:09 pm

UPDATE:

I've solved it finally just when I thought thats it I give up..... MOHAA the crack cocaine of Mapping!
Well it appears that Easygen created the thoughts of brushes it used to make the terrain into a single func_group yet it despite deleting all the attributes referring to the metashader textures the darkside prevailed, ahah! simple spend hours carefully ungroupsing the lot... can't do it all at once I don't have a supercomputer so anything to major crashes Radiant presumable due to lack of memory. Maybe its time to buy 2gig of ram LOL.
Hey presto ever so slowly the terrain lit up until radaint crashed when I got too enthusiastic and selected too many brushes at once..... and I forgot to save every time I did each bit so start again but there is light once again at the end of this particular tunnel

brk_n_run71 · Post by **brk_n_run71** » Tue Aug 06, 2002 10:58 pm

I gave up on EasyGen. The results were too "hit or miss." Besides, All those little triangles making up the terrain send your VIS data size to the moon.

I did a little experiment. I made a bridge crossing a small ravine. In Map A, I made the walls out of brush triangles. VIS data size: ~275000. In Map B, I used LOD patches to make up the walls. VIS Data size: ~103000. That's almost a third the data size!!! Also, frame rates went up by around 12fps in Map B. Considering my comp runs an AMD 650mHz/GeForce IIMX combo, that's a pretty significant increase.

In short, take the time to learn to use the LOD patches. You will get better performance in the long run. Use GenSurf 1.9 to make small areas of terrain in places the LOD patches will not fit.

Just my 3 pesos.

Oh, yeah. I forgot to menton that using LOD based terrain will make for shorter compiles!!!!

wacko · Post by **wacko** » Tue Aug 06, 2002 11:33 pm

Why do you not use LOD-Terrain and take a TGA-file in grayscale for the shaping?!
It's really easy (maybe some experiments with the image weight factor) than anything I know...
Make TGA-file with 16x16 pixels for a LOD-terrain of (16x128units)x(16x128units)=1024x1024, black is the highest, white the lowest,
in LOD-terrain select 'load from image', 'custom blend function' and choose 0 weight for existing and a NEGATIVE image weight (-1=>512units from black to white).

Oddball_Woof · Post by **Oddball_Woof** » Wed Aug 07, 2002 4:36 am

Thanks great replies, I thought Gensurf1.97 was GKradiant plugin and wouldn't work for MOHRadiant.
Will try the grey scale on LOD terrain, which I like except for the time consuming manipulation of verticies, so if this helps great, my problem grew from trying to create decent looking cliff faces that were part of the map action, they required climbing oppppps .....shhhhhhh..... can't divulge the operational details Hush hush don't you know, walls have ears.... Jerry's a cunning fellow.

Oddball_Woof · Post by **Oddball_Woof** » Mon Aug 12, 2002 11:53 pm

OH bum, go back to this map after a break and the fix I though was a fix seems not to work now can't get the terrain textures to appear out of their darkness.