Writing a new RFF / map parser for Blood. Got the basics importing.

#bloodgame #retroshooter #modding #gamedev

Paint bucket tool. Not convinced I like the UX for this tool just yet. Maybe it should behave more like a paintbrush.

#doom #GZDoom #retroshooter #modding #gamedev

Poke face tool.

#doom #GZDoom #retroshooter #modding #gamedev

Tools can now have options.

#retroshooter #modding #gamedev

That’s correct! Any game that can be abstracted down to a planar graph embedding (ie a series of 2D nodes, edges and faces) would be a good fit. Feel free to throw some games at me! Writing plugins to support IO should be a fairly trivial exercise.

At the moment I’d say that’s probably unlikely. As much as I’d like to, the underlying map formats are just too different to warrant putting them into the same editor. The only code you’d be sharing would be the surface-level stuff like some gui elements (maybe). Not much else.

Not much yet, but it's a start.

#doom #GZDoom #retroshooter #modding #gamedev

It's been a few long, tedious weeks of refactoring. I now have a proper caching layer in front of the graph and reimplemented the scene extrusion from the ground up, so now level edits and scene rebuilds are super fast.

#doom #GZDoom #retroshooter #modding #gamedev

Design question. If a user selects a sector, that currently selects both the ceiling and the floor of that sector - the map being 2D and all that.

How does one change floor / ceiling heights independently? Or shift texture coords independently?

#retroshooter #modding #gamedev

Wireframe on shaded just hits different. X texture offsets seem fixed for DarkForces but Y offsets seem... odd. I must be missing something.

#darkforces #retroshooter #modding #gamedev

The state of TESTBASE. Fixed texture scaling and lighting now appears correct (mostly).

#darkforces #retroshooter #modding #gamedev

Merry xmas all! Getting towards the tail end of an enormous refactor and it's actually starting to look like an editor. Testing freeform polygon and edge joining tools here.

More build engine content soon, I promise!

#doom #GZDoom #retroshooter #modding #gamedev

I felt the same. I suppose because my brain is now officially old and creaky and doesn’t want to learn new things, so I bounced off mapster. I’m sure with a little effort I could learn all the key binds but it felt quite opaque.

I’m starting to get that impression. The doom community seem to have a glut of shiny tools - the duke / blood community seem to have mapster and its derivatives and maybe one or two others. Are they actively maintained?

So now the goal is to support several engines while keeping their units and concepts intact, and expose interfaces for people to expand those formats with their own.

I tried going down that path. It’s nice in theory - and being able to author once, deploy anywhere is pretty attractive. However it involves converting to some arbitrary source of truth, and I dont expect any serious modders to adopt them when they’re used to their respective native ones.

Hello! So this project started with hacking various retro map formats and things have just slowly devolved from there. I'd love to get people using it in the future but I realise how much work goes into one of these things. Eventually I'll integrate my proc gen stuff into the mix, too.

Viewport rendering modes. Pick wireframe, solid, textured and shaded. Picking reimplemented - still refactoring some rendering calls.

#doom #GZDoom #retroshooter #modding #gamedev

Haha thanks :) yeah took some time to pursue a few other projects. Also realised that I was going to have to redesign and bunch of systems in order to make headway so that was a bit of an enthusiasm killer.

The state of E1L1. Fixed a lot of issues with UVs. No slopes yet. Starting to rebuild the orthographic view using the same base as the 3D view.

#duke3d #retroshooter #modding #gamedev

I love the internet. Thank you sir! Should be an easy fix.

The state of E1M1. Map now oriented correctly, texture coords and pegging fixed, sector bowties / holes / floating lines handled a lot better, texture assembly via patches almost complete.

I have *zero* idea why the texture STEP2 is rendering this way.

#doom #GZDoom #retroshooter #modding #gamedev

Taken a back seat these past few months as I’ve been busy with other things. Are you interesting in using / contributing?

More importantly, I doubt asking modders to use a coordinate system they're unfamilar with is going to go over well. There's a rich history and knowledge built by these groups and I doubt anyone is going to upend that to use a tool which is slightly easier to use.

I love the idea of modders sharing geometry between games. It means there needs to be an explicit conversion process rather than being transparent. It might not be something many people want to leverage anyway, so currently leaning away from the idea of a standardised coordinate system.

Textures are applied in world space, and now I've changed what world space means. To fix I have to introduce the adaptor layer back into the app again so it’s not just an IO concern. Feels like what an adaptor does should be obvious, rather than having mystical effects scattered throughout the app.

Then there's weird stuff within the *same* engine. Blood’s player capsule seems 50% larger than Duke’s - despite the engine and coord system being the same. You’d expect geometry built for Blood levels to be sized slightly differently to accomodate.

This process irons out certain quirks - Doom's coordinate system is flipped on one axis, Build's up axis not only being inverted and also a different system from the ground plane. It's nice to be able to author tools that work on the same rules without having to take all this stuff into account.

Blood, Duke and Marathon all share similar coordinate systems. Doom’s units seem tiny by comparison. Dark Forces is smaller even still. So scale vertex coords up accordingly and now the 3D viewport doesn’t need to know any engine specifics and I can throw any level at any engine which is kinda neat.

Originally I thought the only sane option would be to convert all maps into a universal coordinate system. This means your adaptor layer sits in front of IO and during normal editing is rarely seen or heard from again. Well, that was the intention anyway.