I've been thinking about doing this for a while. Most Empires materials in the GCF are obsolete or dumb in some way. Most importantly, the idea would be to update all the materials to use blend modulation, SSbumps instead of normals, nicer detail maps, and logical surface properties. We could also strip the pointless texture transform parameters that make the textures scale oddly in hammer. Theoretically we can change the materials as much as we want and won't have to recompile the maps unless we want to generate new lightmaps. I'd be willing to do this all myself but I'm wondering if we could put this in the GCF for next version. We also have pointless copies of all the tool textures in the /common/ folder which, although they work, are inferior to the stock SDK ones when it comes to work in Hammer. I'm not sure if we can just remove them or not but people need to stop using them.
Good idea, the next thing we need is to alter the material and models folder so that ALL CUSTOM CONTENT goes to CUSTOM folder under each heading /emp/materials/custom/Shandy'sShit /emp/models/custom/Silk'sBlend THEY REALLY DON'T BELONG in ROOT MATERIALS FOLDER (review a fresh emp install dir. structure to see why this helps) etc....this would require all RES files to be altered/updated and likely custom maps to be rezipped with new RES file and new "proper" directory structure for materials, etc. This is a relatively meanial task but would go a long way to helping mappers, modellers, and anyone running an Empires server, this way when we update Empires and/or are testing we can sort out what is and isn't available on that version and not have to do a mass 'overcopy' of the folders not really knowing what we might break. If anyone creating NEW custom CONTENT in any form, be it textures, models, materials, could simply start by absorbing this approach from this point on, then we are halfway there and I may start going through all the custom maps and models that are most popular and re-release those. Anyone feel this is a bad idea?
If you move the materials then the maps break. You can't just repoint the .res file because then the materials aren't where they're supposed to be when the map looks for them. If we can do this for future maps, great, but we're way way way way past that point now for older maps.
.....? how is this possible....does the res file not tell the map where to find the file? n/m see why...that blows. k l;et's do this from now on then and perhaps we can ask mappers to clean up there current maps and release new versions at some point down the road
No, the res file tells the server what files to give the client if the client doesn't have them. The map has all its texture references baked into the bsp. You cannot move materials, or rename the bsp without breaking the map.
Is it that hard to recompile all maps after you move the materials into a more orderly structure? I mean I know we don't have all the original maps to recompile them but, we do have most of them. Right?
It's not worth a recompile just to move the material pointers, we're talking in excess of 50 custom maps.
The point is we can edit the current materials as much as we please, without worrying about massive undertakings like recompiling every map that used certain textures. As much as I think a reorganization of all our materials would be nice, we really don't need to spend all that effort updating what maps we can and losing ones we can't just for the sake of organization. Any mapper or anyone working with empires will get used to our current organization and figure out all the content we have anyway.
think it trough, youd have to exchange the materials first, the compiling part is the least dreadful one - a simple batch will do that for you ...
What does that mean? Do you have to click on every surface that uses that material and change its file location? Is there no "select all" of a certain material then change?
You can use a texture replace in the texture editor in Hammer, however you have to do this for each texture that you would like to change.
and then compile and find out you forgot a texture somewhere on some odd place not noticeable right away ... rinse, repeat
You can just do a quick compile without lighting, reducing the compile time a lot. Pretty sure you can skip the visleaf calculations too, so it should reduce the time to about... 1 second. Doesn't the find problems menu show texture errors too ?
