DeleD Community Edition

[Yokom]

When you lightmap a level it changes all the faces to tri's this is normal as all rendering is done in tri's if you need to realign a textture on a face you need to be able to remove the tri line to convert back to a quad so the texture moves and scales acorss the whole face. I attempted to just delete the line in the middle of the two tris to make it back to one quad but it didnt support deleting an edge in this manner.

What to do.

I need to be able to edit and change maps that have been tesselated as we update and evolve the poject.

This also brings me to another problem i can with the plugin import obj files but then i cant load them back in. I could use the method of running around the block and exporting an obj and editing it in wings or blender then yanking it back into del, but no export function for obj.

[Daaark]

You can't. There isn't a 'tri line' in the center of your quads. They have been split up into two objects. What you need to do, is do a save as "map_name_LIT" and light that, and always keep your own good copy to edit.

[Yokom]

[Paul-Jan]

Ok, that's a whole lot of things in one post:

1. Texture aligning on multiple faces (like two triangles forming a quad) doesn't work intuitively. That issue has been reported and we are working on it.

2. Triangulation is an irreversible process (put aside the manual converting back of individual faces, which I will discuss shortly). At some point in the future we might implement a really smart 'simplify mesh' algorithm that converts planar triangles back to higher order convex polygons, but until then, you will always have to make sure you keep original mesh around, unless you don't mind working with triangles directly.

It's kinda similar to working with a .map editor that spits out compiled .bsp files, always make sure you have your original, for that is what you work with. We welcome suggestions for making this workflow more convenient (Vampyre has suggested always 'exporting' the lightmapped file to a different filename).

3. I don't think removing the edge is possible at the moment, but I do think it should. This functionality is not my 'expertise' (Jeroen is in charge of all the low poly editing), so I'll discuss things with Jeroen

4. Do you want to request an .obj exporter?

[Jeroen]

About lowpolygon functions - the following functions are high on my priority list:

- delete vertice
- delete edge
- join faces (which involves deleting edges etc)

However, I'm working on CSG routines right now since there are more requests for CSG than there are about more lowpolygon functions. I'll keep you posted!

[Yokom]

[Paul-Jan]

I have added your request for an obj exporter to the todo-list, I'll discuss priorities with Jeroen.

As you have noticed, the current version of the obj importer (which is more of an example implementation of the plugin system) doesn't support u,v coordinates. However, support for texture coordinates in this plugin has been requested very recently by one of our other users, and Jeroen is working on it

[Daaark]

[Paul-Jan]

Always Mr Subtle, aren't you Vampyre? *lol* Yes yes, you were right all along that something like your suggestion would help smoothing the workflow, it is just that I am not too sure on how to handle things GUI-wise yet.

First of all, I think the term 'export' is not right for an action that writes to a different file still using the native format but with modified geometry. Second, after a lightmapping action you _do_ want to see your lightmapped scene in the editor (and not just a quick click-away preview). If that is not the file you are currently editing (so what-you-see-is-not-what-you-working-on, WYSINWYW), things get really confusing really quickly. Feel free to offer any addtional ideas you have on these issues.

[Daaark]

After the lightmapping, open the file in an external window. Just a window that pops up and shows the level. Like DMFView.exe. or something.

Export is always used to save your file into another wihtout disturbing the current one loaded in memory. It's just that most 3d editors have hijacked the word to use it for "CONVERT THIS INTO ANOTHER FILE FORMAT"

[Yokom]

[Daaark]

[Paul-Jan]

*lol* I very much enjoyed that mental picture of shops with chickens hanging in front of them.

Yokom, the problem is not everything is made of quads, I think what you really want as an artist is to simply work with the original polygon shapes, be it triangles, quads, ellipses, irregular polygons and whatnot... right?

So instead of "converting them back" (which is non-deterministic if you don't have information on the original polygon) I think we should technically 'map' alle the triangles back onto their non-triangulated original polygon. That would have to be handled fully transparent to the user, they would just switch from textured (f3) to lightmapped (f4) mode, and the scene would switch from resp. original to triangulated. However, than we would probably have to make lightmapped mode read-only(*), and it would only update whenever the lightmap is recalculated (and the original scene re-triangulated). Also, when saving, we would have to save both original and triangulated(+lightmapped) data in the same file.

(note how this is essentially Vampyre's suggestion, but the two files are stored into one and his 'pop up' window has simply become the lightmapped view).

(*)not necessarely, but modifying the original scene whenever the lightmapped version is edited would be a tedious task


...

I am not too sure this is the way to go. There is also an item on the todo-list about trying to rewrite the lightmapper so that it doesn't triangulate at all. Which is quite some task but I think it is feasible (because DeleD is restricted to convex polygons anyway), and if we could pull that off, none of the above 'hacks' would be necessary, and we would all live happily after all

All that said (and I didn't even have my morning coffee yet), I release you'd still want to have that 'merge two triangles back into quad' functionality, because it is simply useful.