DF-21 Forums

[Brad Oliver]

To avoid hijacking other threads (and to save me the effort of looking for bug reports in other places), please post bug reports/feature requests/comments for Dark Forge here.

[Zev]

You are one dedicated kind of guy.

[The MAZZTer]

Make it multi-plat.... heheeh j/k

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[Tom Manning]

Okay, when I place a subsector in a sector, then I delete that subsector, and I go to delete the walls left over, most of the time when I delete one the wall goes way off screen and the computer freezes. It kinda sucks. I one of my levels has this problem and I stopped working on it and havent gone back to it. I can always just delete the main sector too, but in the level where I am having problems the sector is big with lots of texturing detail and such, so I didn't want to delete it.

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Tom Manning
For all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you, Stand, Men of the West!
Aragorn: Return of the King

[Burning Gundam]

My objects keep getting erased after a while for some reason.

Copying and pasting sectors from two different files fails to work.

I have the same problem as Tom Manning (above).

Suggestions : Make a program to build VUE files.

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I don't think outside the box... I customize it.

[Tom Resnick]

There have been many times when I've intended to delete an entire sector, but only the inner part gets removed. I then resort to deleting the walls one by one, but the final vertice WILL NOT be removed. Is there any way to fix this?

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T-Minus 15.193792102158E+9 years until the universe closes!

[Tom Manning]

A VUE maker would be even more helpful than a new version of Dark Forge.

Though a new Dark Forge would be very helpful too.

_________________
Tom Manning
For all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you, Stand, Men of the West!
Aragorn: Return of the King

[Patrick Haslow]

I can't believe after all this time, and now that the site here has crashed after almost 3 years that Brad shows up. The site used to have an article about Dark Forge bugs (only 3 weeks ago!).

Anyways, I have probably used Dark Forge more than anyone here, so I am sure I can give a list of problems so long it will make you never want to come back here. For now though, the biggest problem by far is that the INF editor is virtually useless, as it continually corrupts the INF file in ways I can't even understand. I have been creating my INF separately in BBEdit Lite and adding it into the GOB only before its release.

Problem number two is pretty basic. If "save as" is selected, Dark Forge deletes all components from the GOB except the INF, LEV, and O files. Since my GOBs tend to have at least 50 custom files in the GOB, I am forced to do a "close window" command instead, which seems to force the program to save the LEV, INF and O files while keeping the others already in the GOB.

Problem three is more sporadic. Dark Forge has a tendency to on occasion add "phantom objects" to the O file. These usually appear as a bunch of "spirit" objects, maybe 7 or 8 (who knows) all piled up on the same X, Y, and Z coordinates.

Incidentally, why the interest now in your old DF utilities? I asked you about all this stuff over a year ago at the IMG forums and got a decent brush off.

[Brad Oliver]

[Patrick Haslow]

I see. It had just been so long since then I had given up expecting to see you work on these old projects again. Dark Forge has provided me a lot of enjoyment over the years and I thank you for your efforts.

[Brad Oliver]

[Patrick Haslow]

Thanks Brad. I'll fire it up and prepare a report.

[Burning Gundam]

How about a VUE File maker?

_________________
I don't think outside the box... I customize it.

[Brad Oliver]

[Patrick Haslow]

Got some more. The most obvious one for me would be to make it run without switching the screen colors to 256 color mode. It is especially troublesome because it doesn't switch it back after quitting. Since I often make DF textures in Photoshop while using Dark Forge, I am forced to swap my screen mode over and over.

As mentioned before, the ability to do cutting and pasting from other GOBs would be tremendously helpful. At the moment the process loses a lot of data and/or corrupts it.

Maybe altering the texture stitching process to be a bit more like WDFUSE would be nice, adding options to stitch clockwise or counterclockwise, etc.
Also adding vertical stitching would be good.

After the LEV file has grown to a certain size (not sure how big), the program will crash after attempting to use the rotate/flip/scale tools on a sector. Fixing this would be great, and maybe making the sector's center as the origin point of these transforms would be helpful, instead of having to retrieve the transformed sector from wherever it ends up in relation to 0,0,0.

A few more intuitive shortcuts for the interface would be nice, like [SPACE] for the "hand" grab tool, or a multiselect marquee, etc.

Well, I guess I have pretty much listed all my top desires for Dark Forge in this thread. Take what you will from it Brad, and thank you.

[Brad Oliver]

[alkaline888]

I've used Dark Forge more hours than I can count over the past 2+ years and humbly ask for the following to be added to the wish list.

1. For me, THE MOST time-consuming problem that crops up is O file corruption. Sometimes the O file saves fine, sometimes certain objects corrupt and revert to defaults, and sometimes the O file corrupts so badly that the GOB crashes Dark Forge or/and Dark Forces.

2. I find that the INF editor works unless you don't include a carriage return at the end of your code. If you don't, next time you save the INF becomes corrupted. Counter to Patrick's advice, I do my INF programming in Dark Forge, but I always run the risk of forgetting that little carriage return and making a mess.

3. When you try to adjoin walls that are l DF unit or less distance from other walls, a terrible mess results. Walls jump onto other walls, vertices jump on top of one another, the wrong walls adjoin...

4. Could there be a way, when placing objects, to specify which layer the object should rest on?

Fixes to the four above issues would take care of 95% of my woes.

5. The object editor lacks the ability to change the PITCH value of objects (specifically 3dos). Right now, I have to use BBEdit to go into the O file and change the pitch manually.

6. Flipping or rotating a sector usually works but the modified sector disappears from its present location -- I have to zoom waaaay out to find where it has reappeared, then painstakingly move it back into position.

7. Copying and pasting sectors from other LEVs usually works, but all of the BMs change.

Unless something pressing comes to me later, this is my list. Brad, whatever you update, no matter how small or simple, it is very, very much appreciated.

Greg

_________________
Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.
—Kurt Vonnegut

[alkaline888]

Ok, here's another few thoughts. I'm really dreaming with these.

A. The ability to stich textures across selected walls _in different sectors_.

B. I see that one of the PC editors has an option where you can see all of the sectors' lighting values represented. Essentially, each sector is shaded with a lightness/darkness that corresponds to its lighting value. This would make a fine deluxe feature.

C. Or even more useful, a function to "stitch" lighting values -- light to dark -- across several sectors.

Greg

_________________
Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.
—Kurt Vonnegut

[Patrick Haslow]

Oh yeah, and a field to change the light level of a wall would be great too.

[Burning Gundam]

NO VUE EDITOR!!???



_________________
I don't think outside the box... I customize it.

[Brad Oliver]

[Tom Manning]

Yeah, one does exist, but, it is PC so I have never used it, You need to ask a PC user, Barry seems to know his way around it...

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Tom Manning
For all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you, Stand, Men of the West!
Aragorn: Return of the King

[Nottheking]

...The editor is called VUEcad... I'm fairly certain there's at least one other, but VUEcad is the only one really worth using...

VUEcad is a very simple and efficient tool... You select the main points along the path, and use the "Interpolate" (or whatever it is) feature to have the program full in the spots between the points so that you get a VUE that has a unique point for every frame. Also, there are other tools availble to fine tune the VUE.

I've made several VUEs using it, but only my latest one, the one used for the Crow's landing in my SECBASE entry, makes any real sense...

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Wake up, George Lucas... The Matrix has you..

[Lionel Fouillen]

Ha! This is one strange experience. I've been an old-timer in the Dark Forces level editing world, however today is the first time I can see Brad Oliver taking part to our conversations. I'm a PC-only user so I never had the opportunity to use Dark Forge. But I'd like to ask Brad this:

I was planning to buy a Mac with MacOS X some time ago and even asked if the code source to Dark Forge was available from anywhere. My idea was to learn RealBasic and rewrite Dark Forge to improve it and port it (thanks to RealBasic) to both MacOS and Windows.

Brad, what do you think about rewriting the program in RealBasic under MacOS X sothat your editor becomes available for both Mac and PC?

Best regards,
Lionel

[Brad Oliver]

[Burning Gundam]

OH! OH! I HAVE A SUGGESTION!!

The layering system could use a few fixes. For instance, I had this one area where I wanted a fgroup of sectors on a different layer, but I have to do it to each sector individually. I was wondering if perhaps there's a way to group them all together and tell them what layer to go under. The question might sound complicated, but it sounds so simple to do.

I had a friend download a version of VUEcad for me to mess around with and it looked like a pretty simple program. I would imagine it wouldn't be too hard to make it a Mac program too. But that friend is no longer my friend, so that complicates things...and I only used it for five minutes.

Okay, I'll shut up now.

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I don't think outside the box... I customize it.

[Burning Gundam]

Here's another one.

(Hey! Where'd Brad go?)

A polygon maker. Much like the ones I've heard you can use in WDFUSE to make equilateral and equiangular pentagons, octagons, hexagon and etc. Because it's really hard to make it by hand.

_________________
I don't think outside the box... I customize it.

[Nottheking]

[Tom Manning]

Yeah, that's something I could really use...

_________________
Tom Manning
For all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you, Stand, Men of the West!
Aragorn: Return of the King

[Nottheking]

Of course, I've never actually USED Dark Forge...

...So, i'm gonna go through all of the features availible in WDFUSE, that make it my only DF level editor.

Does Dark Forge allow you to directly edit all of the item (sector/object) variables, more or less as they appear in the .LEV or .O file? WDFUSE normally assigns presets for these (I.E. giving the Trandoshan WAX the "BOSSK" logic), you can directly edit them.

Is there a complete sticthing tool? The one in WDFUSE can stitch either or both the X and Y ofsets for wall textures for any or all of the TOP, MID, and BOT sections. It can stitch forwards or backwards, in a single multiselection, or contiunously stich all walls conneted to the selected one.

Although this is missing from WDFUSE, is there a cleave/merge ability? This is also very useful at times.

_________________
Wake up, George Lucas... The Matrix has you..