Jedi_Mediator

That is downright inspiring.

Hey, I've seen some of the recent rend2 updates, and it made me interested in doing a bit of mapping again. What are the current mapping needs for this mod? I was going to post in the "Level Assignments" thread, but discovered that it had been archived. But I'm assuming there is still mapping that needs to be done before the mod is completed.

Archangel mentioned to me that we might want to remake the Gorc & Pic map I did, to include the new rend2 features. Is this a need right now? If so, I would like a bit more information on the work that would be required--I've been using a lot of the same tools for a long time, and I would need to decide whether I want to get used to a whole new set of tools (if that is indeed required for rend2).

If the Gorc & Pic map remake is not an immediate need, I might also be interested in trying my hand at another small map--maybe the Jerec boss level, or the Sariss duel, if either of those still need to be started.

Also just wanted to shoutout @@Jedi_Mediator for his awesome Inferno map which is perfect for these models!

 

https://jkhub.org/files/file/970-inferno/

Hey thanks! Nice to know that old thing is still floating around here somewhere.

Sounds great! Thanks for the update.

Hey, how's it going? It's been a few weeks. Did my PM come through to you, @@eezstreet?

Sorry for the delay! I did my best to add pickups in strategic quantities and locations around the map. I also gave the map three different secret areas.

I'll PM you the files. Let me know if you're wondering where something is in the map, or if you think there's too many/too few of the pickups and secret areas.

Good point about the reborn fight. I'll make that change.

Strange about the waypoint links...when I play the map, I see those very same links as yellow, not red. I assumed they were yellow because they're kind of "conditional" links--the AI could take that path if the glass screens were already broken, but not if they're still intact. Does OpenJK calculate navigation differently, or something? I'll just remove those links, if you think it would make things work better.

The line of dialogue you mentioned is, "That armor seems to resist my lightsaber. I think I can guess how they're using the cortosis." It's found in 18kyk003.mp3. Currently, Kyle says this line immediately after he defeats the shadowtroopers in cairn_dock1. But there's a file just above it, 18kyk002.mp3, in which he says, "Black armor! Not again." I don't remember hearing that in the original game, do you? Would you like to use that instead for our shadowtrooper fight?

And if we want to have only one shadowtrooper in the pit on easier difficulties, I'll need some advice. I don't know how to make NPCs spawn or not spawn depending on difficulty settings.

Thanks for the feedback! The taking-cover behavior was easy to add--I just placed a few waypoint_navgoals in strategic spots, and gave the NPCs a "painscript" to run to those navgoals for a few seconds after taking damage.

I wasn't able to locate a few of the errors you mentioned. I turned on the game's FPS counter at the start of the level, and played through to the crane room without noticing any drops in FPS. Are you able to reproduce the FPS drop you experienced? Also, when you mentioned the broken waypoint links, did you mean the control room directly above the room with shadowtrooper armor? I couldn't find any red links in either of these rooms. Maybe a screenshot would help?

I didn't like the reborn starting in the shaft, either. Maybe he can appear in the red section of the maze, and the player has to defeat him to unlock the next area? And I wasn't sure about the maze ambush either. Should we get rid of that battle completely, or move it to a later section of the maze?

As for the shadowtroopers--are you referring to cairn_dock1? Because when I played through that level, there were two shadowtroopers in the pit at the beginning. Maybe this varies based on difficulty level? At any rate, we can modify the cairn_stockpile shadowtroopers if you think that would improve gameplay. Can their skills be modified through scripts?

I'll start seeing what I can do about pickups.

I have added scripted NPCs to the stairway, the area above the stairway, the two-level control room, the catwalk room, and the first maintenance hallway. I have also added a reborn to one of the shafts in the maze and set the shadowtroopers to not take fall damage. The reborn fight isn't great right now; I stretched a pretty ridiculous "safety net" of the "blocknpc" texture over the shaft to keep him from committing suicide, but nevertheless, he likes to drop his lightsaber down the shaft and stand defenseless for awkward periods of time. Let me know what you think of this issue.

There is also a friendly droid doing endless laps around the crane room, just to make it feel a little less empty.

@@eezstreet, I'll send you the .zip in a PM.

Wow, that is quite a console command! I had no idea JK2 had such a useful feature. I will definitely be using it as I figure out waypointing. Thanks for the tips.

As I was placing NPCs in the big two-level control room, I felt that the top level had too much open floor space, and so I put in some banks of computer terminals on either side. I felt that this would improve gameplay, since the player will be under fire from multiple directions when they enter the room. This way, they can take cover after entering if they want to.

Let me know if it looks out of place or doesn't work for some other reason. It wasn't a difficult change to make, so I don't mind if you don't want it that way.

With the computer terminals:

Compare to previous version:

Do you have any suggestions for tutorials on NPC navigation? I've been able to figure out a little bit through trial and error, but things still aren't working quite the way I want them to. I can get the NPCs to go places, but then they just stand there forever, even when fighting. I specifically want to know how to make waypoint networks (and how to make the NPCs actually *use* them).

I did look through the JKHub tutorials already, but couldn't find much that would help.

Apart from that, the main floor (area with the crane) should be devoid of any enemies, the stairs leading from the lower crane area should have a group of stormtroopers running down the stairs to engage the player, and the maze should have a reborn.

Obviously the level in its current state already has some enemies on the main floor, in the rooms leading up to the crane room--are we keeping these where they are?

As for the crane room itself, did you know that the floor of that room is covered in a large network of NPC waypoints? This makes me wonder if the developers originally envisioned the crane room containing some enemies. If we do make this room uninhabited, we should probably delete all those waypoints--without NPCs, I don't think there's a use for them.

At long last, the four broken areaportals that I was aware of have been replaced, and are in working order! If you find any more broken areaportals during your own tests, just let me know.

As for the NPCs and pickups, how about we split the job? I have some ideas I want to try for NPC placement, but I'm not quite as interested in pickups. Do you have any specific ideas or instructions for placing the NPCs before I get started?

Okay...after some more experimentation, I still couldn't fix the existing areaportals. I have no idea what's wrong. So for lack of a better solution, I literally grafted in a working, areaportaled door from cairn_assembly. That finally worked. So we officially now have one fewer malfunctioning areaportals. Next I'll copy the working door setup several times into the other problem areas until all areaportals are functional. It will be tedious, but it will also be nice to finally make this issue go away.

As for the crane puzzle, yes, all the ref_tags that I anticipated you needing are already in the map. I can add more as needed. The names of the tags are listed in one of my previous posts.

Well, the new school year started up at the school where I work, so I've been getting distracted from this project for the past couple of weeks. But I have still managed to make most of the alterations you mentioned. I fixed the lifts at the start of the level, fixed the pit elevator, added clipping to the pit pipes, added some simple colored lighting and locked door textures to the maze, made the cairn_reactor entrance more obvious, and added more ambient sounds and distinguishing features to the maintenance hallways.

I also added some invisible, NPC-blocking walls to the pit area, to prevent them from jumping off in certain directions while still letting them maneuver between platforms. Hopefully this lessens the problem somewhat. I was curious why the AI fails in this way (i.e. shadowtrooper suicide), and so I played around in cairn_dock1 for a bit. Turns out that you can get them to fall to their death in that pit, too--and that level comes straight from Raven. Curiously, though, it seems far more likely to happen when both shadowtroopers are fighting you at once. It's like they interfere with each other's pathfinding, causing them to miss jumps. Is it very difficult to simply make them invincible to fall damage, either through code or script? I'm not sure there's a surefire way to protect them from themselves using mapping alone.

As for the crane arm, I had another idea. I could create a script that triggers just before the player enters the bugged room (the one with the crane arm sticking up), causing the crane arm to move somewhere else--basically hiding it, temporarily, from the player. Then, if the player ever returns to the crane room, it would return to where it had been before the first script was triggered. It's a workaround, not really a fix, but it would get the job done. Does this make sense?

I'll PM the updated level to you, @@eezstreet. Feel free to suggest changes/additions to anything I've done so far.

Holy cow, are you testing this in JK2? Where did the dynamic glow come from?

Nice finds with those architecture bugs--I will make sure to fix those lifts ASAP. As for the pipe sticking through the catwalk, that is actually the crane "arm" sticking up from the main stockpile room below. As I mentioned before, the arm is so long that it sticks up through the room above it--but if it were shorter, it wouldn't be long enough to extend all the way down to reach the crates. We discussed some possible solutions to this, but I don't think we've decided how to fix it yet. What if we made the crane into a powerful magnet, so that it lifts the crates through the air without having to physically extend?

I think the shadowtroopers would still jump to the higher platforms if chasing the player, in which case they would still be at risk of jumping to their deaths. This seems more like an AI problem to me, but we can still move them down a level to see if that helps.

I will go ahead and add clipping to the pipes in the pit.

The pit elevator has been a problem from the beginning--I've never been quite clear how the developers intended it to work, since the elevator itself doesn't seem to even appear in the first place. I have tried to fix this, but can't figure out what's wrong. If you want, instead of fixing the currently broken elevator, I will just replace that portion of the elevator with parts that work. I might not end up as the devs intended, but at least it will be functional.

This is the feedback I needed in regard to the maze. I knew the hallways were pretty repetitive, but I thought that if there were any visually distinctive areas, it would take away the challenge of finding your way. Do you have any ideas about what visuals we could add to the maze, without making it too easy?

Finally time for another update! The entire exit area, at least according to my own layout, is now complete and functional, including the transition to cairn_reactor. @@eezstreet, I will send you the updated files so you can test them, if you want. I will be glad to fix any bugs and/or make any changes as you see fit.

I have not created any new shaders, no; I have only been using shaders and textures that were already used in the assets provided by Raven. That's why this error is so puzzling to me.

I increased the _lightmapscale to 2 and that did fix the problem, at least for now. I don't understand why this worked, but I think I will have to accept it for now. It will cause lower lightmap resolutions, which will lead to lower visual quality in some areas. This drop in quality will probably not be noticeable most of the time, and if we find any shadows that are noticeably blurry, we should be able to locally change the _lightmapscale in that area without causing the error to return. That's my hope, at least.

The good news is that, with this workaround in place, I should be able to resume development! I'll post an update once lighting is added to the exit area.

...and I've run into a problem. After doing a light compile, I began receiving the following in-game error:

WARNING: RE_AddPolyToScene: NULL poly shader

The error spams nonstop at the top of the screen during gameplay, and all models are covered in the black-and-white "missing texture" grid. While trying to find the cause of the problem, I copied the map and tried deleting the entire exit area I've worked on recently, then recompiling. That fixes the error. So something in the area I've been working on is causing the problem...but I have no idea what it could be. I am using only base assets in the map, and I have not installed anything mod-related recently. I've never seen this error before.

If anyone knows what causes this error, feel free to enlighten me...but in the meantime, I will keep working to find and eliminate the cause. I need to solve this problem before I can move on with development.

Brief update: I've finished the basic layout I had in mind. There are several maze sections, increasing slightly in difficulty as the player reaches the end of the level, with the vertical shafts and maintenance hallways interspersed to add variety. The breakable vent leading to cairn_reactor is in place. There are a few places where we could insert a reborn or shadowtrooper duel, when it comes time to do that. And since I've been using the prefabs, it would be easy to rearrange things a bit if needed.

The map is currently playable, but the whole exit area is still pretty bare-bones. Next I'll be working on adding lights and details so it fits visually with the rest of the map.

This stuff is always tricky to explain in words, so I'll use pictures instead. Here's the flow as it is right now.

Pic 1: Player is on the top tier of the pit, ready to jump onto the pipe and then onto the walkway, headed for the door seen center-screen.

Pic 2: Player has reached the walkway. The door opens when the player comes near.

Pic 3: Player has walked through the door and finds themselves in the reactor maintenance hallway.

I figured these hallways would function as the Imperials' access to the "maintenance shafts" (AKA the exit maze) for workers coming from different parts of the base. So the player would first enter the maintenance hallway, progress through a small section of maze, reach another maintenance hallway, do some more of the maze, etc. until reaching a final hallway where they will be able to break a vent and enter cairn_reactor. Does this make sense? We could limit the maze to 3 or 4 different sections to keep it from becoming tiresome.

Shots are below.

The hallway in the shot is currently connected directly to the pit through a door. It's somewhat in shadow, but if you look closely in the shot, you can see a ramp leading to the left off of the main grated walkway. This ramp is where the player enters from after reaching the catwalk at the top of the pit. Does that make sense? We can change it if you want.

And I think it would be easier to modify the pit in cairn_stockpile to match the one in cairn_dock2, rather than the other way around. Do you want them to look basically the same? (Also, do you mean cairn_dock1? Cairn_dock2 does not appear to be included in the original game.)

Yeah, I think we should make use of the prefabs that are in cairn_bay2 or cairn_bay. I believe I included those in my PM to you. They're very cool, they have glass floors and big vertical shafts and can be fit together to make a small maze. You could maybe do something like this that matches with the entrance to cairn_reactor somehow. Feel free to edit the entrance to cairn_reactor as you see fit. I think maybe one of these vertical shafts could be a nice place for a lightsaber fight.

Okay, I've imported the prefab from cairn_bay2 and will start arranging it into a maze. From the shot I posted above, do you think we should include my maintenance hallway concept in the end of the level? I was thinking of including several similar hallways, to break up the monotony of the prefab maze, and maybe put the level transition in one final hallway at the end.

Preliminary shot of the reactor hallways. Nothing is complete yet, this is just to show the general concept and mood. Suggestions welcome.

Okay, I'll leave the extendable walkway as it is.

I've started laying down the brushwork for the reactor maintenance halls. Previously you mentioned something about an exit maze--do you think that's what we should use these halls for?