Torque Pipeline for Cartography Shop - Beta 2 Released!

#41 @Dave - Mucho fun ! :) . I use the lights on the Object Categories, not the Torque categorie. That's why I didn't tough to see those lights in torque.

And you know what ? CS is working dual-monitor. That is really fantastic :) Hiting F12 (3D full screen) and seeing your building on two monitor at a time is really cool ! :)

#42 Yea if you use the Torque lights you won't get a lighting preview. I was considering writing an alternative light.exe which would run the map2dif lighting pass on the scene to get the actual Torque lighting, but Josh informed me that light.exe has some security in it so people can't export maps in the trial version. So that isn't an option for CS4, but might be for CS5.

#43 @Tom - I though that when the automap was ON, that I couldn't arrange the textures, I was completely wrong ! The automap OFF isn't needed at all. I hope you didn't worked on it yet or I'd feel really cheap. Really sorry for this. :(

#44 @Gilles - No prob. Still setting automap off has it's benefits and i will eventually make it work.

#45 @Gilles - Are you able to see the full screen view on one monitor and the other views an another monitor at the same time? Are you running one or two instances of CS to do this?

#46 @Dave - No, the way it is is like if my 2 monitors was only one (resolution of 3200 X 1200). So I can see the 2 left windows (3D and Side) on my left monitor and the right ones (Top and Front) on my monitor at right. And when I hit F12, I see only the 3D view but on the 2 monitors at the same time (BIG !). Only problem is that I have a 21 inches at left and a 19 inches at right :) so it's a little off from one to the other but for editing, it's not a problem. For playing games, that is a problem. I've tried car games like this and it's really cool, but would require 2 identical monitor to enjoy.

[Edit]
Here is what it's looking and also show a complex map that is exporting nicelly for those that this could be of interest.

#47 Nice guitar! :)

#48 @Will - Thanks ! :) Was a challenge (BSP) but with good tools, we can do much.

#49 @ Tom (a follow up from here www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=25888 to avoid polluting Matts topic any more)

Instead of more options for TSE on a single export menu why not have separate 'Torque dif' and 'TSE dif' menu items under the export dropdown?

I can see the list of "If you are using TSE then uncheck X, Y and Z checkboxes but remember to check A, D and G checkboxes" instructions getting unmanagable as you add features :)

#50 Well first of all so far there isn't an option that is incompatible across TSE and TGE... the lightmap borders would be the first issue. Still it's possible that TSE will see official support for lightmap borders fairly soon (some merging is planned after TGE 1.4 is released).

Also i could see someone not wanting borders at all or smaller borders. I'll have to jam that into the interface too.

Still having two export options... TorqueSE DIF or TorqueGE DIF seems like it would make things clearer than the checkbox i use now for that. The only issue is that it's more difficult to maintain than i would like. CartShop only supports one exporter per-dll... so i would have to maintain another DLL with a few changes of it.

I'll consider it for sure.

#51 Tom

I am having texture problems with cartshop and the dif exporter while trying to create some ramps (long flat box objects) with various rotations. Automap is on for all objects.

Objects rotated about 1 axis only are fine - they texture properly in Cshop and display properly in Torque.

Objects rotated about 2 axes texture (nearly **) properly in Cshop but are totally misaligned in Torque.

The ramp in the pics below are rotated about both Y and Z axes (Y first, then Z)

Cshop ->www.vhp.co.uk/cshop_ramp.jpg (also showing texture angle slightly off due to whole degrees of rotation only)

Torque ->www.vhp.co.uk/torque_ramp.jpg (texture rearranged at export)

I made sure NOT to use skew or vertex movement.

Any ideas of what may be up with this?

**Cshops whole number of degrees for rotating textures makes it very difficult (if not impossible in some cases) to align a texture with an object - please implement automap = off support :)

#52 @David - I've heard of this trouble with Matt's new map2dif stuff too i believe. I need to go thru the code which creates the left and up texture axis and see why that fails and how to fix it. It will be after GDC before i can get to this and finalize things for the 1.0 release.

CShop texture rotation is not as flexible as i would like. Some improvements in CShop5, but until then we'll have to make due with what we have. Automap off is still on my list of things to fix.

#53 Tom

Thanks for the reply.

I can work round the texturing by making it look wrong in Cshop so it lines up right in TGE (pain in the backside going backwards and forwards but it works)

Having used Cartshop for a large map, its a pity that the author seems to be adding bells and whistles before the fundamentals are finished. The geometry creation and working layout are great. Texturing can be problematic and impossible to align on some objects.

It will be interesting to see what changes will be made to the basics in version 5 of Cartshop - at the moment, I dont think I will be buying it.

#54 @David -- Well texturing has issues... but it's not bad for most cases. I've already got a request in for a texturing mode where you can offset, scale, and rotate the texture with the mouse.

I'm waiting to see what CartShop5 does before i make judgement.

#55 @ Tom I just wanted to tell you I bought CS last Friday and I have been using your exporter. It's great. I stumbled around with bad exports in the beginning but then I printed out the help files and printed out everything from the holodek site and I keep learning more with each export.

A good thing to do is save your CS file often. Also it is good to close out the app after a bad export/exporter crash. I learned this after not closing out and then creating a new dif (say a box) to export, it would then not export correctly even though it was a perfectly legal dif. Hope that made sense.

It still has its awkwardness but it's still a hundred times better than working with Quark IMO.

#56 @Michael - Thanks. I'm aware of the re-export issues. I thought i had fixed it last time, but i've reciently found new cases where it would produce different DIFs on subseqent exports. I'm gonna do one more beta after GDC which should have all these issues cleared up.

#57 @Tom
Michael mentioned the re-export issue where starting a new dif to export it would not export correctly. I have observed the opposite where I get warnings when I export my building and if I reexport it again I do not get any warnings at all. Then if I restart CS and re-export that building again I get the warnings.

#58 @Todd - That's definately possible. The problem is that the original map2dif code isn't exactly elegant. I've fixed a few places where static vars were being used in an effort to increase performance, but would contain junk from the last pass on second export. It also has a habbit of using uninitialized vars... if i change the memory allocator to initialize all memory to zero the exporter will change how it processes your map. I'm considering moving the map2dif code into another process that gets completely destroyed between exports to ensure this problem goes away. I'll be getting back to map2dif next week.

#59 @Tom
If you are interested in my file that caused the errors I can send it to you if it would help you track down where things are getting messed up. Thanks for the quick response.

#60 @Todd - Yes please email it to tom at sickheadgames dot com.