DeleD Community Edition

[ogtrax]

Hi, I've been enjoying DeleD for some time now, and I have some suggestions on features I think would be good to have.

A dynamic flag for primitives, which if checked, will disable the primitive during the lightmapping process. What would be even better, but not really necessary, would be the ability to set a primitive to dynamic, by using user manageable regular expression filters. With this, people could create regular expression filters adapted for their use of the tag property.

It would also be nice with a tag property for lights as well, in case lights will be using a script for differeent effects. If the filters match here, the light would not be active during lightmap generation.

[Paul-Jan]

Hi there Ogtrex, welcome to these forums!

Being able to disable both lightmapping on (and shadowcasting by) primitives is pretty high on our todo list. It has been suggested before, and it's a good point indeed!

User defined tags on lights are being implemented as we speak, they are included in the new file format that's part of the next release.

However, I am a bit lost on the dynamic part, as well as the regular expressions. Could you give an example of such regexp use? They put regexps in tags? Matching what? Defining what other objects to influence?

Without dismissing anything yet, because it does sound intriguing, I am a bit hesitant to introduce regexps into a modeling application. Writing and reading proper regular expressions can be a real challenge for coder/developers, let alone modeler/artists. Regexps are great for solving complex filtering tasks... but I'm not really sure it's a good sign if a modeling application contains such tasks.

[ogtrax]

Dynamic is just a obvious name for it, since this way the lightmapper know that this geometry may move (hence dynamic), and thus, lightmap info for the geometry will just make it look weird when teh object moves and the light info and shadow stay the same.

With regular expressions, you can use it to find a specific pattern in the tag, which will automatically make the object dynamic. I use the tag space for multiple things, with this rule: param="value" . I use , to seperate
parameters. So, with regular expressions, I could add a filter like this: .*\(,\)\?(script\|platform\)=\\".*\\" (grep syntax) Which would make all objects with a script bound to it, or platform objects, dynamic.

EDIT: When I think about it, if the two other features ( light tags and selective lightmap generation ), it should be possible to implement regular expressions through a plugin. The plugin can import the level, go through all objects and check the tag against the filters, and disable lightmap generation for the object if a filter match, then when its done it exports it back to the editor

[Jeroen]

[Paul-Jan]

Ogtrax: Thanks for the explanation, it all makes sense now.

1. We will add 'does not cast shadows' and 'does not recieve light' style properties at the object level (as well as at the material level... and we are discussing whether it would be good to have the latter property at a per-face level as well)

2. In the future-future we might implement set-some-property-for-all-objects-that-match-certain-filter-criteria behaviour. Or more likely: generic search-and-select functionality, and then you can set the property for all selected objects at once. However, at the moment this functionality is not on top of our list (other things have higher priority), so this might take a while.

3. If you want to have the regexp filtering before that, a plugin would indeed be the way to go. Like Jeroen said: we are currently working on rewriting the plugin API, so please hold on...

[trucker2000]