Irrlicht Engine

Good work afecelis

I know from my practice - sometime /almost every time for me/ writing of tutorials can be many boring stuff.
So, I congrats you for your patience and for those good stuff.

thnx Captor! I'm flattered receiving that comment from someone with your experience and background.

I tried to make good tutorials keeping them as simple and uderstandable as possible so that the community could take advantage of them.

@Gfx, about making the tuts; I draft out the structure of what I want to transmitt, write it on paper, then write down some ideas under each topic of what I want to say and when. So basically yup, it's all planned, but many comments that cross my mind while creating the tutorials come out as well...and even some errors!!! lol

And your dog .

I don't get how to create those skyboxes in GMax, do you have a .gmax example somewhere? Do I just have to create a big box, made of some smaller, stretched boxes?

lol!!!

Bal, grab this file and uncompress it into your Irrq3 folder:
http://www.danielpatton.com/afecelis/files/Irrq3.zip

1. check my tutorial testmap(irrq3.gmax) in the "maps" folder, open it in
Gmax.

2. Notice how I created 6 boxes surrounding my level and textured them with a sky texture that I located in the textures/common folder. Since the normal flipped box would give leaking errors, having 6 boxes would solve it.

3. Also notice how for the concrete material I'm typing the path in the name field (Irrq3/Irrq302) so that when I export to map I already have the material paths ready, but check the "sky" material; for it I only typed "sky" in the name field of the material, and also when exporting to map I don't change "sky" for the path to the texture. This way when Irrlicht loads the map it won't find a texture for those 6 brushes making them disappear and therefore showing the skybox!!!! But you get no leaking errors

final word: remember to comment out the lines that load my 3ds file for the upper glass, otherwise your app will get errors.

cheers!

Hi great work,

It really helped me, is allready looking for a while howto make maps in gmax and us them in Irrlicht. Now i'm new at this so I i have some questions.

1. How do you work with sizes, do you make your levels the size you want them to be in the game, so large in gmax or do you give them the size with Irrlicht ?because in one off your tutorials you say it's easily done in Irrlich.
2.When I want to make a door or window with GLB gmax hangs and i have to restart gmax.

And again great job !

I've been playing a little bit with these techniques, it works great, i've found a few tips :
- instead of writting down which texture correspond to what name, i use the "material navigator" that simply makes a list of it.
- not to have to change the map file by hand everytime i change something, i've made a script with "BK replace em" (free) that replace all the texture names by the file name. it's also removing the "wad" line. with a bat copy, i can add the player starting position

I still have a few issues, with lights. They are weak, even if i use a multiplier of 10. Even if i scale down the level. seems i can't scale up a light. So, how to have bright big powerful light, like daylight, what's the tip?

Really thanks, afecelis !

Your works are what I'm searching for a long time. It is extremely useful for me.

Billion thanks

billion "you're welcome" !!!!!

Hi!

Nice work, this tutorial is great, but I'm missing something. I don't want to modify the map source every time I create a new one. So I made a little tool, that does this hard work It grabs the source from gmax, erases the "wad"... line, adds the player start entity, changes the texture names, and saves the map. You can dowload it from http://chati.tvn.hu/map.zip.

hey Csati, many thnx for your file!

looks very interesting. I'm downloading it now and will try it ASAP.

thnx for the hand!!!

@Afecelis: Look into your PM...

Hi all!

I have made some changes in my program (it had some bugs ). Now (I hope) it is fully functional. The link is the same (http://chati.tvn.hu/map.zip)

hey very good tutorials, except i cant get my map to comple ... i get no errors, it just doesnt do anything when i compile ... it finds the map i hit compile says a few lines of texts bspc says it cant find anything then it just quits and there is no bsp.

what are the possible reasons for this?

ok i fixed it, just need a new version of q3map2 for some reason

This is awesome. I was just looking for a way to make some bsp maps and this is helping a lot. Quark is a bugger to use and I can't even make its compiled maps run in Irrlicht (I'm probably doing something wrong). But this, using gmax and stuff, this is a WHOLE lot better. I like it. I didn't have a use for gmax before, I use Wings3D and Truespace, but now I do, heh.

I wonder what Irrlicht's support of entities is? Does it read entities from the BSP? Or does it simply ignore them? Because it would nice if I could set up my engine to read the player start entity.
Worest case scenerio I could write a map parser to get entity info out of the map file. That wouldn't be too bad, though it's a little redundant to have both the map and bsp, but oh well.

I don't like havign to go through this long process to expot the bsp either, but I'll live with it. I'm just glad that this is all working. I'm sure a plugin could be written for gmax that does all of this automatically.

BTW GMax provides UV tiling and offsetting through the material editor, but it seems the map exporter ignores it (and many other things). Oh well. Text editting the map is all we can do for now.

I glanced over this long thead and noticed a lot of talk about using Irrlicht skyboxes or something like that. Why are you doing it that way? Isn't the standard way to build the skybox in to the map and texture it as a sky? Seems like the easier method as well.
*shrugs*
But thank you afecelis for all your hardwork. I and many others appreciate it.
BTW, what video compression were you using? It seems like horrible compression for videos that have only minor changes between each frame and a framerate of 1. Maybe you should look into another codec to reduce the size of these files (without quality loss).
50mb for 3 minutes of 1fps video is pretty nasty. I can compress an episode of the Simpsons, 22 minutes at 24fps, down to 100mb and the quality is perfect.