Post by ppnhzk in Level Buddy comments

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Thanks for the very handy tool!

I am using it to create old-school fps levels. So far the sectors work flawlessly but I had problems with the brushes. Something went wrong during build map so I had to reset the location, rotation and scale of every brush after finishing the layout. This way they did not get distorted during the build process. I leave this here in case somebody bumps into the same problem.

Edit: The problem came back so I looked into the python code. There are 2 functions which do some rounding. I changed both of them to round to 2 decimals instead of 1. This solved the geometry displacement for me.

Edit: I encountered another problem with substractive meshes. Sometimes they break the whole thing for some unknown reason. A simple substract window copy messed up the whole save file. I had to reload a previous state.

Ben3d6 years ago

I get problems with the substractive mesh too. Did you check if the mesh normals of your substractive brush are pointing outward? Sometimes it solves the problem.

ppnhzk6 years ago(+1)

Normals should be okay by default. I suspect there is some limitation in blender or the plugin. Sometimes simple brushes connect in a way that breaks the script. Other times I get a very thin layer on one side of the substracted doorway for example and cannot place a floor under. With some tweaking they work. I will leave the rest for post-edit.

As for the window problem I do not know what was the cause but I remade the whole thing and now it works nicely. I have to admire the simplicity of creating free-form window sockets.

Ben3d6 years ago

Do you have screenshots?

ppnhzk6 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Well, I can supply one recent if you are still looking at this post:

I originally had a problem with the one brush selected but after going through all the parameters of neighbouring objects and hitting enter on them many of them broke during build. You can see the parameters on the left picture which should not be a problem.

PS: Of course the really interesting thing is that these were carbon copies from the other side which work just fine.

Matt Lucas6 years ago(+1)

It sounds like an issue with the way the sectors are being combined. Because I basically boolean everything together and booleans do not always give the best geo you can find strange issues like this. Try changing the sector group to see if that helps. Group A gets processed first and then group B so this is one way to get around these kinds of issues. You might need to adjust a neighboring sector instead of the one that is having issues but it is at least one more thing to play around with. I hope this helps and sorry to hear you are having issues.

ppnhzk6 years ago

Unfortunately the whole thing breaks too often for me. Been building a town with brushes but pretty often I end up breaking the build script so I have to hunt down the one part/intersection that causes it (usually one side of a window edge which consists of 4 parts connecting in 45 angles in the corners) and turn it off/remove it. I use incremental values like .25, .5, 1 or 2 for building so I had previously removed all rounding script from the plugin. Now I thought I will download the original once again but modify the digits to 3 to suit my values. Since then the build button crashes the whole program.

Other thing that I tried is to select all the parameters of all the objects near the one faulty and press enter, confirming them. After that a lot more of these brushes broke. So, for now I it would seem that Blender could not position brushes properly thus breaking this plugin. Should this plugin work with 3ds Max so I can abandon this utter garbage app?

Matt Lucas6 years ago

I just added the ability to set the rounding level of the vertex positions. Its called 'Map Precision' and can be found by the build map button. This should let you adjust the rounding without having to crack open the script. I have not heard about the build button crashing the whole program, if you can capture an error or shoot me an example blend file I'd love to dig into that and find the problem. I also just fixed a few annoying errors that seemed to pop up a bunch so maybe the latest version is a bit more solid for you. Since I don't work on this full time it gets hard for me to stay on top of it as much as I would like.

ppnhzk6 years ago

Thanks for the update and feedback! Finally got around trying out the new version. Precision update accuracy is a great addition, for me a value of 3 should be good enough. However I had 2 problems at the start:
1. The location precision update does not use the value which was given on the ui, only the cleanup vertex which means that my sectors get displaced because of the original 1 decimal accuracy.
2. For some reason a vertex Y coord of -4.25001 results in -4.251 after rounding. Also, I do not know why these odd values even exist.

Matt Lucas6 years ago

1) I must have missed the sector placement precision cleanup, easy fix. Thanks for catching that and letting me know!

2) Floating point numbers are never precise which is why I had the rounding set so high. It seems to get more inaccurate the longer the number is after the decimal point which throws off the Boolean operations and gives errors or incorrect unions. In the old days of Doom they used integers for pretty much everything. If you were able to get away with using only whole numbers I believe you would see fewer if any errors...but the scale of your map would be pretty big and chunky.

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