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Hi.
 
I have some problems..

1. Lighting. I have some stairs (which are placed one on top of the other), and are placed right up against the wall. Problem is, lighting likes to go through the edges of the stairs, even though there is no space between the stairs and the wall (this is on snap-to-grid on macradiant.), or even when the stairs come through the wall a tiny bit.
Here are some screens:

This first one, is a shot from my older map, CTFWaterWall, with lighting from a light entity below:
(http://kick52.com/Dump/oa/error1.jpg)

The second is again from CTFWaterWall, with light coming in from a light entity far away.
(http://kick52.com/Dump/oa/error2.jpg)

Now, this is from my new WIP map, also with a strip of light down the bottom:
(http://kick52.com/Dump/oa/error3.jpg)

As you can see, there is no space between the wall and stairs for light to pass through:
(http://kick52.com/Dump/oa/error4.jpg)

So it isnt an isolated error for me anyway.

---

2. With my WIP map, I wanted to use some custom shaders. I have only copied an example, to test it, but it just wont show up in the list.

In baseoa, I have: 'textures' with a folder named 'kick52' in there, and in 'kick52', I have lava.tga, which is 16x16.

In scripts, I have lava.shader, which has the contents of:


I also have shaderlist.txt, which has all it should have and 'kick52' at the bottom. (I have also edited the oa.games's default_shaderlist.txt just incase.)

But, 'kick52' is not appearing in the texture list. I have tried restarting radiant, and flushing and reloading shaders.

(BTW: my editor is MacRadiant 1.5, though I doubt that should change anything.)

Thanks.

It's not light "Passing through" your geometry, it's the fact that lightmaps are very low resolution. If I recall, there's 1 lightmap pixel to every 16 texture pixels given the standard lightmap resolution. The wall behind your stairs is a single surface and has a lightmap that runs accross it's surface. There are several things that you can do to fix this.

a) Make your world geometry thicker. When you make surfaces unnaturally thin, like your stairs for example (which don't look like they could actually support their own weight in reality) you leave yourself open to lightmapping errors like this. What I would do it to either fill in the space underneath them if it's not relavent to gameplay or select them all, stretch them all 32 units or so backwards, then use the clipper tool to give the underside of the stairs a nice slope.

b) Make the surface on which the lightmap is showing through geometry, make it a func_group and then use the _lightmapscale key to make the lightmap higer resolution on that particular surface.

c) In areas where it's possible, like the flat walkway at the top of your stairs, clip the wall that it meets with and then caulk the unseen faces on the wall. this should break up your wall and stop it from being a single lightmap surface, thus stopping the "leaking" light.

Personally I would recomend the 1st option unless it's absolutely necessary for your surface to be very thin. But even then even with things like catwalk that are naturally thin, they will have a support strut or plate to attach them to the wall which is quite thick. Remember that making things too thin destroys the imersion and sense of belief that the person playing your map will experience.

Haha, glad to have someone very knowledgeable in mapping like Amphetamine here ;)

ah, thanks amph!

Yeah hehe nice post Amp. I suggested that he do the third option you provided.
Never even thought about the 2nd option before o_o
I learn new stuff every day hehe.

i fixed the shader problem.

it was looking for kick52.shader, which i dont really understand.. but nm.

great.

i followed the first suggestion by amph, and it worked!

thanks.

Happy to help :D

Just remember that the devil is in the detail, but the art of mapping is all smoke and mirrors. Fooling your audience into believing that they're in a location with lots of detail, when in fact their surroundings are quite simple.

For an example of what I'm talking about, let's say you wanted to make somthing that looked like a forest stretching out as far as the eye could see, but the player can't actually go into that forest it's decrative so that you don't have just another wall blocking the way. You'd only really need 2 rows of trees, then a texture of trees behind that and possibly a skybox with somthing that looked tree-like at around the right sort of level. The player will look through the 1st couple of rows of modeled trees, and their brain is already telling them that this is a deep forest, so that's what they'll see.

Sound is another great way to give a feeling of being in that location as well. A lot of mappers overlook sound as a detailing tool. The trick with sound is that it just has to sound similar to the noise you want. For example, listen to a plain sample of white noise (the sound of tv/radio tuned to static). Now, as you;d expect, if you put the target speaker near a screen  with static on it, then the player will be convinced that the TV is making that noise. Now take that same sound and put the target speaker next to a waterfall. The player will hear that sound and because it is very similar to the sound a waterfall makes, theat's what they'll hear.

What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes. Now go and make some great maps.