Windcatcher

[Edgar1898]

Hey Windcatcher, been trying to get ahold of you for a while now. In there something I'm missing about how to create indoor zones with OpenZone? Like suppose I want to make a cavern, how can I set the ceiling? At present I am doing the following: Creating an outside zone with mountains on the edges and then making a new ground texture and making its height the level I want the ceiling to be. Surely there has to be an better way to make indoor zones. Also about the ceiling and cave walls, is there some way I can make them with varying degrees of roughness, like the way your rumple ground option works on the ground?

[Windcatcher]

Eww...no, that's definitely beyond OpenZone's capabilities...You might want to give Dungeon Builder a try and see if that helps, but that's meant more for corridors and such. What's really needed is something more generic, some sort of sculpting tool that lets you create anything. Maybe Khan has some ideas...he knows a lot more about 3D tools than I do.

[fnemo]

Khan is out for a week or so, so you'll have to wait for an answer.

[KhaN]

When you want to create complex poly like caves, you have only one option, 3D Softwares like 3DSMax, Maya, Gmax ...

You can do your caves by two ways :
- Poly : You will rumble a simple plane (create a generic plane with sectors and move the vertex to get a rumble effect.
- Texture : Create a simple tube (8 faces ?) and apply a photo realistic texture showing rumble rock cave.
I suggest solution two personally, its quick, and free a lot zones polycount, and most of the time, no one will notice its not rumbled walls (when texture is of good quality).

OpenZone, Dungeon Builder are great tools, but hit a limit when you want to do complex poly :/

[Shadow-Wolf]

AAAANNNNDDD you can also use GTK Radiant to make quake 3 levels and import them into OpenZone, dont look at me for GTK Radiant help though, look for tutorials and work off from them.

*oooohhh looks like ive offended daeken's senses. Oh and GTK Radiant is a level editor, not a modeling program.

[daeken_bb]

AAAANNNNDDD you can also use GTK to make quake 3 levels and import them into OpenZone, dont look at me for GTK help though, look for tutorials and work off from them.

You mean GTK radiant, _NOT_ just GTK. People calling GTK Radiant just 'GTK' pisses me off to no end...

One is a toolkit for GUIs, and one is a modelling program.

[Spike]

:raises hand: I have GTK Radient experience, I use to make maps for JK2 and JK3. Been working with the program for about 4 months.

[Edgar1898]

One other question WC: do you know where the water information is stored in the zone files? Basically I want to be able to determine if a location in a zone is under water so we can send the right packets. Could fix a lot of problems.

[Windcatcher]

It's in one (or more, but usually one) of the 0x29 fragments. You have to take the player's position, walk the BSP tree to the right node, and then cross-reference that with the 0x29 fragments to see if the node is included in the list. Of course, you can do the cross-reference in advance for all tree nodes, but you have to watch for the fact that different 0x29 fragments can point to different things (water, lava, PvP, teleporters, zone lines, etc). There are also two different ways of encoding water areas (an "old way" and a "new way")

[Edgar1898]

Sounds like a pain, but in theory we could create an additional map file that contains these areas for use with our servers, right? The only two things that you mentioned that we should probably include in there is the water areas and the pvp areas. About the old and new ways, are they drastically different? Is there somewhere that the new format was discussed?

[Windcatcher]

The old way has "WT_ZONE" as the name of the 0x29 fragment. The new way has "WTN__" as the first five characters the 0x29's Data2 field instead (in the old way, the Data2 field isn't used).