texinfos

[Oliver Greaney]

i wanted to put hl2 engine to limit
i am working on a hl2 mod street politics
anyway i was building a huge complex map and everything was going fine till i went to compile the hole map together but it would not compile because i reached the texinfos level of 12288 and went over it by 4000 textures

at first i didnt know what this ment but i figured out that you can only have 12288 scalable textures this is crap does anyone know how to put limit up so i can compile my map
and does anyone know of any way of rescaling textures to the default 1.00 setting with out manually doing every single texture
or is there any texture that the compiler egnores the nodraw and black texture dont work it still takes em as a texture and compiles them as rescable textures

 

[RoyalEF]

Going on what I know from HL1...textinfo is the number of unique texture settings. So if you constnatly used TEXTURE_LOCK on (little TL icon on toolbar), every copied brush is likely to have its own texture setting. I'm not positive about the compiler trashing texinfo from unseen brushes--at this point with the engine and tools being 10 years mature I would hope to god so.

This is simply a limitation of how much memory they reserved this kind of info. You can go around and reapply textures using uniform settings to simplify it. However, on my PC , the texture application has a bug with APPLY ALL(texture and settings). The first click on a face and the texture tool loses all its settings except for the texture. I wonder if this single handedly added several weeks to the completion of HL2 as mappers constantly had to re-lift setting after forgetting to work around this bug. Anyway hold down the CTRL key as you click on faces to apply texture settings. This gets around the useless "feature".

I'm sure you have plenty of simple textures that could reuse existing setting. Remember that a 512x512 texture scaled at 1/1 looks the same at 0,0 offset as it does at 512,512 or 1024,1024. So you could have tons of different offsets that actually line up the exact same way. One would hope the tools would wrap values but there may be some cases where wasteful values work into the map.

 

[Oliver Greaney]

thanks for the help i will have to be a lot more carefull in the future i suppose its down to the way i texture my maps as i make the geomatry. i agree with you it does seem to be odd that there isnt a tool texture that would solve the problem i mean i had to get rid of 4000 textures(that were not part of the map)that were given properties because i had copyied em several times but i managed to get rid of them by manually left clicking copying a texture that had default properties it must have taken 30 hours to do but i will be a lot more carefull in the future.

 

[RoyalEF]

Yeah, texturing in general needs to be a lot smarter.

One sad thing, and it is a knock against Valve is that I don't think they understand the needs of a Mod coomunity as well as they think. A polished editor is the basis of everything done out on the internet. Worldcraft had so many basic bugs that every single mapper in existing would trip on and would cause total failure until you researched on the net how to fix it. World craft installed itself with no configuration. Worldcraft couldn't compile RAD because of missing lights.rad, all light entity had invalid deefault settings, and those were the basic dumb stuff. Nevermind all the real bugs on top of that. Zoner made the compiling tools valuable and efficient, not Valve.

Five years later, Hammer is shockingly no different--in my opinion worse. Hammer installs with no configuration--you must manually configure it to work and find Valve's own programs?! Hammer is !!AGAIN!! missing a default lights.rad file and !!AGAIN!! people can't do a VRAD. LOL! The Texture application doesn't do APPLY correctly, the MOST COMMON FUNCTION IT HAS IS BUSTED!! Although I'm not sure how pervasive that bug is.

Thankfully it does have LOAD pointfile and the made VMF native to the tools so no MAP conversion errors. But the compiling tools have actually degraded from the level Zoner raised them up to. Where is brushunion?--a brilliant tool in bsp for detecting overlapping brushes! And Valve seems to be keeping distributed net processing a secret for now-- i see people asking but nobody can find docs on how this works or what parameters you need. Everybody is guessing.

And with some of the bugs--like alpha tool in displacement and texture app, I wonder how valve got their work done internally.

And here are some earthshattering concepts for programmers... error checking and validation. . .
If I make a brush FUNC_AREAPORTAL... it must have the areaportal brush on it... why not not change or offer to change it for me. HINTS must use SKIP and HINT... displacement can't have NODRAW... water should have NODRAW and ONE face of water... check, validate that the brush is appropriately textured.
There are lots of these that could be done and they would speed mapping and reduce the parade of same-question, same-sanswer that fills HL mapping forums for six years now.

And the texture tools--geezus is this thing in need of serious overhaul. Someone want to explain to me how I can MAKE a txture perpendicular to its axis on purpose with the texture tool. It is an error that I have no idea how to cause and only seems to fix using CHECK FOR PROBLEMS. I think that has always been pure bug. And then there is the new naming convention. I love this. The names are so long you can't read the name of the texture in any texture listbox. If I want to figure out what texture a face is using I use th texttool, LIFT, then do a REPLACE cause that kgive me a textbox whre i can scroll back and forth to read the whole line. Aggravates the piss out of me. And there appear to be some suspicious directories of textures, DEV, test, shadertest... Are these usuable for production maps? If not exclude them from the materials list. An advanced mapper could include them but they are NOISE! What about excluding model textures. They dont' function as normal textures. Water, tools, why can't we get some controls to narrow down textures. If I'm searching for a world texture exclude models, water, transparencies, and such. make things easier!! Gasp! what a concept.

I think the fact that no polish has been added to Hammer or the compiling tools in five years explains why Valve needed five years. People like to think of Valve as pro-mod but I don't see them investing it making the basic tools of mod-life functionally intelligent. That has historically been done by the mod community itself.

Phew... that rant felt good.

 

[Exavior]

The fact is, most game companies rely on the modding community to most of the leg work for them. It is common place for game companies to release an engine/sdk with little-to-no documentation or resource applications. The mod community is generally a collection of resourceful and intelligent geeks that write their own documentation and applications to share with the rest of the community.

It would cost the company both time and resources to provide such tools/information to the mod community. And the modders the game companies really care about (the ones who can create _real_ mods, not just make a map or two) create mods that, on their own, sell copies of the game engine or produce so much money in sales that the game company claims a percentage of the earnings. People with the skill to create such mods often have the ability to do most of their own grunt work.

This time around, valve has actually done a great job providing documentation of the source engine, so they have made some improvement over the years.

That is not to say your average game fan should not attempt modding, but they have to at least understand that game development is a money making business and the attention of the game development companies is often directed more toward the end user that can turn a profit for them, rather than just make their own map to share with their friends.

I hope that did not sound too negative, but that's capitalism for ya