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Doom3 Editing Tips/etc
Figured with Doom3 out now, we should start a seperate thread from the other Doom3 thread dedicated solely to getting into mapping for it. Ask questions, post some tips you've seen posted elsewhere, etc.

Myself, last night I quickly attempted to open the editor (run doom3 with +editor for a setting to open it), but it opens in whatever my Doom3 resolution is, and I don't have a mouse pointer :( Makes it difficult to map.

I'm sure issue will be solved through some settings, and this is the perfect place for them, so we can all learn the new little tricks together.
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Oops 
r_skipPostProcess 1, of course. 
I Am In Hell 
After familiarizing myself quite well with GTKRadiant in preparation for Doom3 editing, I'm quite disappointed to see that D3Radiant is nothing like it.

More than half of the textures don't load, texture alignment is a bitch, so on and so forth. Bleh. You'll find me trudging through the D3World forums for the next month while I try and crank out blitztest.map.

(PS this is a not so subtle cry for help. Please. I need tuts.) 
"Alphamaps" In D3 
Sort of. The blending is done by using vertex painted models.

Put vertexcolour in a material stage, and that stage's RGB data will be multiplied by the vertex colour. Black vertex = black texture, white vertex = normal texture. Add another stage using inversevertexcolour instead, and you can blend between the two stages by changing the vertex colour from black to white (or shades of grey). This is nice because it's very flexible, but you do need a modelling app.

Take a look at rock.mtr to see how it works in practice. 
Bl1tz: 
To fix broken textures, get this:
http://www.pcgamemods.com/7464/

Bleh, I was going to write lots of stuff here and then I figured most of is was stupid, so fuck you hitler. 
Blitz 
Just use GtK 1.5. It's a lot better. 
I Thought 
gtkr d3 support was ass? 
Necros/zwiffle 
Yes, GtkR D3 support = ass.

Also:

GtkR 1.5 = ass.

Therefore:

GtkR 1.5 with D3 support = DOUBLE ASS
 
I like 1.5 a lot better than d3r. It's a lot easier to use imo. D3r is so hard to get a knack for, but I picked 1.5 up in like 30 minutes. Besides, it's still in beta. 
Plus, 
d3r is full off pantaloon bugs... 
Balderdash 
D3Edit is GOLD. Solid gold I tell you. There's only two things annoying me there which is a record of some sort.. 3D clipping is broken (try it, funky) and texture streching on rotated textures provides hours of puzzlement. Strech first, then rotate!

I like the in-editor rendering (and the ability to switch into D3 for entity testing) too much to switch to 1.5 which doesn't do all the stuff like particles and GUIs.

Blitz, don't worry about missing textures. There's a lot of obsolete material files. Just get the fix if all the black boxes in texture view bother you. I personaly don't care.

And since this is a editing tips thread.. I assume everyone knows this already, but just splitting faces at light boundaries isn't enough. They get merged back together in the compile. You can stop this by mirroring the texture on some axis, or giving it 1 unit (or less, haven't tried) offset. In some cases you can't even notice it in the game unless you don't know what to look for. Brings up framerates nicely.

Another thing.. when running D3 in a window, never ever type 'QUIT' in the console. Instead just pull console down and shift focus back to the editor. I've noticed this almost completely eliminates crashes related to reloading the map in D3 after compile.

Don't bother carefully placing and rotating the moveables, ragdolls and whatnot. Just rougly place them, launch game, show ragdolls who's the boss with g_dragEntity 1, push & shoot the moveables around and then do saveMoveables and saveRagdolls. Loading up the map again in editor shows that stuff is nicely disorganised now.

Objects and Decals texture folders are totally worth of extreme abuse. Loads of good stuff for building all the cool small things. Base_wall also has some stuff that should belong to either of those. Func_FX stuff is also something worth checking out. The syntax is quite simple and you can do nice combined effects with it (light, sound and particles in the same entity).

Don't use lights with shadows turned on, unless it makes the area look cool, monsters or other objects need to cast shadow there or you have movers that should cast shadows. In most cases, lights player can't reach can have their shadows turned off, which helps framerates. Fog is just a light with all options turned off and fog texture selected. Thickness can be controlled with shaderParm3, value being the distance in units where it turns completely opaque. Darker (really dark) colors look generally better than bright.

Use speakers liberally but with moderation. If you think some detail in map could emit a sound, add speaker to it. To avoid oversaturation, use short s_maxDistance and low volumes when dealing with directional sounds. Sounds with s_omni set are great for adding general ambience sounds for areas, don't overuse these or the sound will get murky. IE. 8 s_omnis in a small room isn't that great idea. Since there's no music, you'll want 100% ambient sound coverage for the map. Add sounds as you go, it inspires mapping a lot.

And if you add that goddamn mars buggy model to your map, go play CS. 
A Big Issue 
I hate the camera in D3Radiant. It's so hard to point at excatly what you wantt, which I think is the main draw of having a 3D view. Anyway my hope is that GTKRadiant gets better support, someone makes a new editor, or D3Radiant gets patched/optimized. 
Rubbish! 
The camera is plenty accurate enough. And if you really want to finetune it, press mouse 2 in 3d viewport and move mouse around. I find it quite speedy enough just with keyboard commands. 
... 
speaking of sounds, Ive been having issues getting them to work.

Most cases I want untriggered area sounds with low volume. but so far I've managed silence... :( 
!!! 
You have s_looping 1 set? Do you have the entire path in s_shader, including the extension? (.ogg in most cases) 
Hmm 
And CTRL+MOUSE2 in the 2D view jumps the camera to the clicked point 
Hmm 
That should of course be mouse3, not mouse2.

And just clicking mouse3 on it's own in the 2d port faces the camera at the point you clicked 
Qwik Tip 
shift+rclick in z-checker sets lower bounds, ctrl+rclick in z-checker sets upper bounds, ctrl+shift+rclick in z-checker enables/disables vertical bounds, so radiant only draws brushes and objects that appear between the bounds. Useful if you're working on a level that's somewhat vertical.

OK BYE! 
Custom Entity Names 
adding +seta radiant_nameprefix <yourname> to your doomedit shortcut is quite handy if you are working with someone on a map, for example if you make a light, it will be light_yourname, atleast that way you know who put what where, hope that helps somehow :)

Ha 
good to know zombie, cheers 
Zoombie 
actually that is a very tasty feature for larger projects indeed. 
Probably Answered 
But I did not see it: When I click my shortcut my desktop gets fullbright. You know what I mean - Everything becomes SUPER bright, like maximum brightness. Why is this?

My shortcut looks like this:
"C:\games\Doom 3\Doom3.exe" +seta com_allowConsole "1" +seta r_fullscreen "0" +editor +r_mode 5

I couldn't find a shortcut or answer to why this happens, even browsing Doom3World.org. 
Zwiff: 
probably the ing-game gamma -- hardware gamma correction occurs on the entire screen, rather than just on a single window. 
Yeah 
probably the ing-game gamma -- hardware gamma correction occurs on the entire screen, rather than just on a single window.

Yes, which is annoying as hell when DOOMEdit crashes, leaving my desktop gamma the same as what I was using in DOOMEdit (which I set as super-bright so that I can actually see shit in real-time lighting mode). 
Save Your Retinal Integrity - Get QuickGamma 
From shaderlab.com. It puts a nice simple gamma control in your tray, making it fairly easy to use DoomEdit at the same time as other things without going blind. 
Or Setgamma 
which is available on the fitzquake page -- it's command-line activated, which might suit your needs better (or worse.) 
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