AB3D2_LevelED Help required

[abu_the_monkey]

Originally Posted by Karlos

All of the modders are in this thread, having this conversation.

Regarding the engine dependency, yeah my mod basically depends on the current engine. If we lose the music, it should run on the original engine still, but thanks to bugs you've fixed with door and lift textures, hidden things won't look right.

yeah.

but. I do wonder if there are some others working on secret projects as the builds I post seem to always be downloaded by at least 4 people other than yourself.

[Karlos]

I wonder if the Xenium Core author is aware of all this. I got quite friendly with him back around 2000 or so when I was making a gameplay mod for quake. I might have an email address for him still.

[Karlos]

Thanks to the new per level floors, the first level can have some new niceties.

The captain gets a nice simulated wood desk surface in his/her ready room.
Bridge console now looks light it might actually be a console.
The armoury gets a reason for it's strange blue tint.

[grond]

This looks superb! Judging by the looks of it, this is elevating what originally was a rather bleak looking game to DukeNukem3D quality.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by grond

This looks superb! Judging by the looks of it, this is elevating what originally was a rather bleak looking game to DukeNukem3D quality.

The idea to have a floor tile override per level is to get around one of the more annoying limitations of the game: it has one set of 16 64x64 tiles for floors/ceilings in the whole game, for every level.

Even with this new mechanism, we are still restricted to 16 tiles per level and we still have to respect the "properties" of the floor, e.g. if it causes damage and what noise walking on it makes. While I am definitely happier with what we now have, I do think it probably makes sense at some point to see what can be done to increase the total limit but without breaking compatibility with the existing engine.

I am also wondering if allowing levels to override the wall textures in the same manner. This would allow for a lot more variation. Custom wall and floor textures per level would allow levels to be more coherently themed than they are now. For example, I could have a lot more "space ship" wall textures in the first level instead of a bunch of rock, slime and bricks that make no sense. These could include cool things like large displays, maps, signage and so on.

[Karlos]

@abu_the_monkey

What do you think? If there's a wall_N.256wad in the level directory, where N = 0-F (hex), we load that wall graphic instead of using the default one?

This is a bit more work in the engine than the floor tile override, but imagine what you can do with per level walls. Totally worth it if you ask me.

3000th post

[Karlos]

Created some floor textures to go with the new weathered rock texture in level M. One for exposed rock and a sandy one for the where the water is. It actually looks better in motion than the screenshot suggests.

[abu_the_monkey]

Top stuff

@abu_the_monkey

What do you think? If there's a wall_N.256wad in the level directory, where N = 0-F (hex), we load that wall graphic instead of using the default one?

This is a bit more work in the engine than the floor tile override, but imagine what you can do with per level walls. Totally worth it if you ask me.

at some point yes, but that may be much more complicated than the floortile.

3000th post

Thread Hog!

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by abu_the_monkey

at some point yes, but that may be much more complicated than the floortile.

I am going to try it in the engine first. Not sure how well that will turn out. I am pretty sure there's a managed array of pointers to the wall data already, so what I expect is that I will just need to have a global version of that and then an "active" set which has some pointers overridden. There'll need to be some other variable that tracks which slots those are and frees them at the end of the level then reverts to the global. This is essentially what we did for the floor, duplicated.

Except, it's bound to be more complicated than this because there will be some funky addressing and other things going on. There always is.

[abu_the_monkey]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Created some floor textures to go with the new weathered rock texture in level M. One for exposed rock and a sandy one for the where the water is. It actually looks better in motion than the screenshot suggests.

just downloaded and had a quick run around, looks AMAZBALLS!
good work

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by abu_the_monkey

yeah.

but. I do wonder if there are some others working on secret projects as the builds I post seem to always be downloaded by at least 4 people other than yourself.

That's awesome. I hope some other people are working on it too. I always felt that it should've seen more mods, but it was challenging back in the day. You can say what you like about emulation, but being able to edit in one UAE instance and immediately open the level in a second instance has been transformational in terms of just being able to get stuff done. There was no equivalent workflow back then.

[Karlos]

Did any AMOS experts ever chime in here?

[abu_the_monkey]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Did any AMOS experts ever chime in here?

No, not yet.

[Dunny]

I mean, I used to class myself as an AMOS expert but damn guys that was like 30 years ago now.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Dunny

I mean, I used to class myself as an AMOS expert but damn guys that was like 30 years ago now.

I was more expert in avoiding AMOS. I don't mean to knock it and I know a lot of people used it but I just couldn't get away with it. I preferred Blitz in the short time before I gave up and moved to C and assembler.

[Karlos]

@abu_the_monkey

Making some progress with the per level wall texture override.

I am probably going to start mithering you for that soon

-edit-

It's done and the PR is raised. Overriding individual wall texture slots per level is now a thing.

[abu_the_monkey]

I am probably going to start mithering you for that soon

I'll just leave this here
3.9.0

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by abu_the_monkey

I'll just leave this here
3.9.0

Rapid work!

[abu_the_monkey]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Rapid work!

had a couple of hours free, managed to modify an existing function and graft it into the load level function.
the editor should let you know if it loaded 'standard' gfx or uses 'custom' gfx, it is not specific as to whether it was a floor or wall but I thought it would be enough.

that and trying to modify the wall graphics to incorporate bright offsets was starting to mess with my head, don't know enough about gadtools, never used them before.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by abu_the_monkey

had a couple of hours free, managed to modify an existing function and graft it into the load level function.
the editor should let you know if it loaded 'standard' gfx or uses 'custom' gfx, it is not specific as to whether it was a floor or wall but I thought it would be enough.

Absolutely. In any case, it should be obvious when using the wall texture tools.