DeleD Community Edition

[kwakwaversal]

Hi,

I'm not sure where to put this so I apologise if its in the wrong thread but I had a few questions for the DeleD community before I purchase the pro version ( I'm going to do it anyway so don't feel obliged to reply to get my monies ) and start my designing.

My flow is going to be: (DeleD & irrEdit) + (c++ & irrlicht) = Some kind of room based fps (wow, surprised you all!)

I'm basically a jack of all programming, hack of all editors and cheeky monkey but this time around I've made it my mission not to do any "quick fixes" to get what I want. So I've read through a lot of the forum, help docs and a little bit of the wiki and have got my hands dirty in the editor to get a feel for it and I think it'll do what I want to do quite nicely. Before I continue down the DeleD road I want to make sure I'm doing things properly from the beginning so I would appreciate any help

Scale

The first question I have is what is the best scale to use or what tricks should I use to create rooms / hallways? By this I want to know which gridsize is the best to use, at that gridsize, how many grid blocks is the standard height of a room? Do people alternate between gridsizes when creating doorways or wall features to align them correctly?

I've followed some of the tutorials and have started building room shells then adding prefabs but they're always MASSIVE and I've got to scale every one of them. Is that because my room is so small or because all the prefabs are huge?

If other people use irrlicht, do they save their maps as DMF or export to B3D? How do you work out the correct scale for this and or irrEdit?

Rooms

Does anyone have any tips for designing rooms? How to cut out windows and doors or add glass?

Lightmapping

http://www.delgine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2731&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=scale&start=60

In the thread above, elementrix and Daaark are discussing lightmapping scenes. And Daaark said this about lightmapping;

[Nocturn]

edit: welcome to the forums kwakwaversal

About Scale:When you use Irrlicht and the DMF loading routines you can easy scale your stuff down how you want. For example; my (major gridlines) have a value of 100 - so when you use for example OGL Units and you model a cube your cube should be 1*1*1 meters. I think you can also fire up IrrEdit and change that there somewhere.

About Rooms: Well, when you have the PRO Version you will definatley enjoy the CSG tools - no problem to cut out windows, doors etcetera. Glass would be a shader when you're work with Irrlicht.

About Lightmapping: Why would you Lightmap in DeleD when IrrEdit has Global Illumination ?

About Plugins: Maybe you should check the PluginSDK shipped with DeleD, theres a Help file and some Templatefiles you should check, i'm not working with Delphi.

[Mr.Fletcher]

[Paul-Jan]

Regarding the lightmapping of large polygons, whether you'll need to cut them up depends on the size of your smallest polygons. If they are a couple of thousand times bigger (usually implying your geometry is not very well balanced and has boring-long-flats, but it does happen), the lightmapper might not be able to trike a nice balance and yield ugly results. This is mostly trial-and-error though.

Like Nocturn says, IrrEdit also has a lightmapper. You are more than welcome to compare the two, and if you end up deciding IrrEdit's lightmapper does a better job

Regarding Delphi: Any version will do, really. Well, Delphi 1 is still 16 bits so that's probably not the best choice, but other then that any Delphi should be just fine, all it has to do is spit out a standard DLL and export a predefined set of functions. For example, the free Turbo Delphi Explorer (2006) and/or freepascal should work just fine.

[kwakwaversal]

Thanks Nocturn

The answers were very helpful and they've definitely helped push me in the right direction to achieve what I want. I hope my design skills compliment my imagination but we'll see in due course!

I'm glad to be progressing away from "fps creator" because even though it was quick to generate rooms etc... they weren't as detailed as I wanted. CSG to the rescue I hope!

[Daaark]

First of all, you should also segment the polygons in any large object. Why would anyone want an object with gigantic polygons? Lightmapping or not.

[Basiror]

because they consume less memory?
frankly, lightmapping is a technique used in the past nowadays raytracing will be the next big thing in interactive 3d applications and there you get dynamic lighting and global illuminations for free more or less
as for raytracing, less triangles means less memory usage, thus high cache efficiency, thus high frame rates

[kwakwaversal]

I'm confused, is splitting large polygons up (walls, floors) into smaller pieces good or bad?

[Paul-Jan]

For your current pipeline (or anything you might have planned for the near future), it's best to not worry too much about it in advance. Just build the rooms the way you see fit, and if you run into resolution trouble with the lightmap, then subdivide large surfaces into smaller pieces.

[Daaark]