If you want to read more about the changes and additions, head over to the 0.8 Readme.
New graphical user interface
No bad excuses anymore why you didn’t curvify your maps, thanks to the shiny new GUI I clobbed together in a few months.
It can do almost anything that is necessary to generate curves with Map2Curve without the need of creating your own preset-files.
New texture stretch setting and more
Among other texture related features it is now possible to stretch textures to the curve either adaptively or by a fixed amount.
adaptive texture stretching
adaptive texture stretching
adaptive texture stretching
fixed texture stretching
fixed texture stretching
fixed texture stretching
New height curves and height calculation
I added new height curves with a few functions from easings.net and overhauled the way those are being distributed among the sections. It now works the way it should.
Furthermore height is now being specified by the total distance instead of per step.
If you want to read more about the changes and additions, head over to the 0.7 overview page.
New Main Features: RMF Export and Circle duplication
The 2 most important additions to the tool are the new ability to export to RMF format, which solves the limitations that come with the Goldsource MAP format, and the new carve function for brushes, which makes the creation of highly complex seamless curves possible.
The base principle of this construction method follows an article, that was first posted to the Sven Coop forums by Kirito in 2018.
Downside: Floating point coordinates
The biggest downside of this method also applies to the new M2C feature: floating point coordinates. Because of these it is usually a good idea to turn the generated curve into a solid entity like func_detail and enclose it with worldbrushes. However it is also possible to use the generated curve as world (seals off the level). Whether this works or not depends on how well the compiler handle it.
Changelog
Added RMF export per default. Can be toggled with “rmf” 0/1.
Added carving for detail objects. Can be toggled with “d_carve” (0/1).
Added ability of custom origin brush and entity for detail objects. Either add an “ORIGIN”-textured brush or an info_target with name-keyvalue “ORIGIN” to a detail group.
Added random detail object group scaling withing limits. Can be set with “d_scale_rand” similar to other transformation commands: – d_scale_rand “1 0.5 2” (0/1 min max)
Added automatic assignment of any entity to a detail object group. Can be toggled with “d_autoassign” (0/1) and only works globally at the moment (for all curves at the same time).
Added flatcircle (0/1) command to make Pi circle flat instead of pointed. Original circle size is being maintained.
Added another bounding box type: Hollow box. Can be used with “bounds 2”.
Added a precise circle spin mode for detail objects. Can be toggled with “d_circlemode” (0/1).
Added vertex welding for carved brushes and fixing of “borderliner” vertex coordinates (e.g. 128.00002 = 128).
Added 3 beginner PDF tutorials to the tool archive.
Fixed a problem due to different vertex order of MAP files that were exported from J.A.C.K. editor. M2C would print invalid brush errors without apparent reason.
In this release I focused on adding the overdue “intersecting” extrusion method, which essentially produces very precise results, compared to the so far available simple spline extrusion method.
A Goldsource level mainly generated with the new curve type “intersecting spline”An interior scene generated with the new seamless texture mapping mode
There are a lot more smaller changes, some of which are important to know. As usual you can get it from the known sites:
Hello there! Recently I tried to create a model replacement for a Goldsource game for the first time. I had a hard time figuring out the optimal solution, so I made this tutorial to make it public and also not forget about it in the future.
The following buddies are the two characters I was working with. The problem is, not only are they having different sizes, they also have very different proportions. This is usually a problem, because it demands a change in the skeletons bone layout, which will then again lead to outdated animations.
I will show you how I overcame this issue in Blender 2.8.
I wanna quickly show you what I’ve been doing for the last .. 8 days. Some guys from Sven Coop are doing a Christmas map this year and I volunteered to create a snowball cannon. Now I made it far enough to show you some results:
It probably won’t be of help for anybody really, since it is a DevC++ project and basically conforms to C++11, but maybe that isn’t such a big deal for somebody who is desperately trying to find out stuff about Goldsource/Quake map generation?! IDK, go crazy on it. Good luck!
Getting close to release: I more or less finished some remaining issues with the new feature (detail objects).
As you can see it is not a big problem to generate complex curved objects with a lot of details, while still being able to preserve some polygons. The last part is of course spoken relatively, since scenes like these will always consume more polygons than simpler ones and thus have to be used carefully.
After weeks of annoying guesswork I was finally able to implement proper rotations for point entities. Now if you ask yourself “Isn’t it just like rotating a vertex in 3D?”. Well, not exactely. Let’s just say I now know a lot more about Euler angles and rotation matrices than before and I am “absolutely” sure that will be of help in my future life. Yaha.
Anyway, when including detail groups into a source map (loose objects that are not meant to be a part of the curve itself), their member entities can be automatically rotated both along the Pitch and Yaw axis, which means the objects will follow the curve entirely in direction and orientation. This can be helpful to generate specific scenes I can imagine.
Realistic scenes like the one I added.
You know. Realistic stuff like that.
I think I will be able to release version 0.5 in the next couple of weeks.