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I just realized that floor and wall painting modes don't work exactly as I think they should in my copy of FPSC.

If I paint out a room in say "Armory Full" and then I go to the upper left corner and switch to (F) floor mode and paint down a lab floor then the walls in that corner also change to the lab walls.

Shouldn't the floor change, but the wall entities stay as they are?

Otherwise floor mode is only useful for painting in the center of a room or away from other walls?!

Is this a bug on my end? Do others observe this behavior?

(This also happens when painting in wall mode. ALL the adjacent walls in the square become the same type of wall as what is being painted.)

Can you create 1 square with 4 different walls?
(Well you *should* be able to...)

Cloud of Crows Studios,

No you are NOT incorrect - I discovered that problem a while ago while wotrking on the texturing of room segments recently referred to here at the forum. Its just another major problem for those wanting to make their own segments. It sems to be just the way FPSC is working. Dont know if TGC see it as a bug.

What you are describing is that walls inherit textures from neighbouring walls or floors.

Placing them can be tricky as its a bit erratic. The best way I know to get around it is to make many segment rooms with differing textures where needed and try and match your level textures up correctly.

Difficult to explain if youve not encountered the problem - but you know whats going on like I.

For instance what you can get say is a pavement outside a building will inherit the floor of a room inside the building which is different as its adjoining - this means you get one section of pavement different from all the others - not what you want!

The only way I see of beating it is make another room section like the one which is inside the building with the wrong floor texture thats appearing outside the building and put the pavement texture on that - it means you have to create an uneccessary room segment just to fool the editor into placing one floor tile with the correct texture outside the building.

This inheriting happens often with me and is a pain - what happens is you cant just paint a wall or floor - when you choose to do so - i.e. paint walls only - the floor changes incorrectly too.

A for instance - I have a room where I need a windows texture to appear on two sides - the external ones - the editor wants to also put the window wall texture on the side walls too which are internal walls needing no windows - though the plain wall texture (without window) is available and scripted correctly so should appear on the side walls - the editor wants to decide which it chooses quite often inheriting the incorrect texture.

Fighting with the editor long enough and trying deleting the walls again then rotating the wall placement etc, etc usually works eventually in most instances but not all, but its buggy, long winded and a pain and in the final analysis some walls just wont take on the correct texture, but insist on inheritance - usually in the most obvious place where you dont want it to happen.

The problem seems to be partly caused by initial placement of wall or room segments. What I mean is once you click a room segment into place you seem to be knackered. If your choose for instance paint floors only thereafter if you go back to paint walls only on the same tile - it dont paint all the walls - it remebers the initial choice and does not want to let you change your mind - its not updating anything. Similarly the same applies to textures. Once you place your initial room - then when you place another up against it - the new adjacent room tile inherits the previous tiles texture as that was placed first. It may well be related to the inside outside wall feature - whatever - it should not have a mind of its own so is a big problem if not a bug.

You are not alone here.

"Can you create 1 square with 4 different walls?
(Well you *should* be able to...)"

Well the answer is with great difficulty or No, when quite obviously the answer should be Yes. Maybe its asking for too much?

I think not.

Just think of trying to place two or even three rooms adjoining with differing textures on each wall, floor and ceiling.

Now just pray for a miracle, or be prepared for a lot of headaches.

In my opinion, this is just one example of some of the important issues which need looking at and fixing for V1 before the fancy features are considered, but I'm probably in the minority here -I hope not. - For some reason a lot of people seem to like bells and whistles in preference to basic stability and features working properly, though why I cannot imagine why. I hope personally TGC dont go that way.

Thanks for the reply uman.

At least now I know it's not smething wrong on my end (and hence no need to scrap everything and reload FPSC - shudder)



Had to read that twice



Well I certainly do. Or at least a bad design decision. This kin dof goes hand in hand with a prior thread I had created which Lee kindly responded to here:
http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=48233&b=21

Hopefully he has this on a list to revisit. I think the whole segment system needs just one more graceful tweak to make it a lot more functional (a seperate floor and ceiling mesh for example just as there are interior and exterior walls)

Since the entire system hinges on a grid I don't see why segments would be *required* to be encapsulated into individual cells. I realize not all wall mesh would look right next to each other, but really the problem isn't in meshes to begin with.

FPSC SHOULD have been coded with a simple texture replacement system for segemnts. Of course anybody whose had to hand code the texture reference in 16 places just to change a single wall texture knows what I mean.



UGH! I was hoping this wasn't the case.

My intent was to make a series of floor segments that I could mix and match with my various wall segments. *sigh* Obviously this greatly compounds the issue as I will need to make many many segements each with a different floor or ceiling texture. Meh!



Agreed. Physics and shaders do little good when the basics are not yet fully covered (save & load, GUI problems, bugs, difficult to create new segments, etc. etc.)

Save the bells and whistles for AFTER the product reaches a stable and functional point.

Cloud of Crows Studios,

Though extremely annoying and a massive time waster - all is not lost currently and some of the things you mention are not quite as problematical as you have suggested I dont think. Just a massive waste of time resources. No click and play here.



Actually there is a known problem with the single wall mesh segment "Large Wall" and I remember a thread where Lee suggested he would give us a new individual single wall segment that would be useful possibly for room building - at the same time I see no reason why that might not be used as a ceiling part also if it were to be made so by TGC i.e. same properties as wall (double side texture, rotate for ceiling use). When do we get it TGC? Though that again would not overcome any cell/tile inheritance bug as far as I can see - the bug needs fixing.



Textures in script are quite easily changed by mass search and replace of names in notepad so its a reasonably quick operation, though direct in editor application of textures to faces would be the ideal. (browse and click)



I dont think thats the case entirely - There is no reason why you cant do this - you can make a new (new name) floor .x file part (or wall) and associated texture for any room and just reference that but I am not sure that this or making completely new .x file rooms entirely will actually always fix the problem of inheritance as it does not overcome any updating cell or tile issues FPSC may have, and why you would want to I dont know as just referencing new textures alone will achieve the same result. Its only very isolated instances I have found the problem of inheritance cant be beaten so you should not need make completely new room segments in every case of adjoining rooms. I use the same .x files for all rooms which are the same i.e. all flat square walls = all same .x files.

I love bells and whistles but at the moment I have literally hundreds of textures - internal and external - to make for new room segments for City buildings with multiple floors that you can get inside and then try to get them applied while fighting with this inheritance problem whilst at the same time fighting with the FPS problem. Thats not to mention the hundreds of entitity instances.

Its a daughnting prospect which I dont look forward too - though theres no option other than too wade into it.

RAD its not - so I dont need the bells and whistles yet - I need somewhere to put them first.

I checked out this thread :

http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=48233&b=21

Nothing conclusive or helpful there :

Either you can choose to have a room texture where you want or you cant?

You cant

Whats two floors above got to do with anything? It might as well be a hundred..........like a miss is as good as a mile. We are talking adjoining rooms or walls/floors here.

I dont have time to wait for any fix for this if it ever comes so will overcome any probs with my own workarounds like the ceiling one I outlined in another thread.

By the way problems with texture inheritance on internal room walls inside buildings can be overcome by using an .x file entity for those plain walls. Again only one x.file is needed for all instances and the change made via a script texture reference. Of course that may have FPS impact but FPSC FPS is erratic anyway so its just another prob to accommodate or workaround.

The Floor/Wall painting bug is the reaason I have quit all of my projects using FPSC. It got to the point where my frstration level outweighed any desire to find a workaround. I really love the product, but in the current state it is not even useable for certain rooms and projects that I had designed.

I hope this bug is on the high priority fix list, because I would like to continue my projects with it

Sadly I believe that what you are feeling LostSoul is why many of our more serious brethen have left the forums.

It's painfully difficult to design a large scale level right now. Not impossible, but very difficult... unless of course you stick with the default media and even then

I sincerly hope that TGC is following the dwindling FPSC forums and realizes that what is desperately needed here is a solid V1 with all basic features enabled and stable.

Cloud of Crows Studios,

I agree.

Not much going on here at the Forum. Few it seems are trying to develop a serious game with FPSC though I may be wrong there and they may be working away too busy to appear here and not just dissapeared altogether. I doubt you will see many commercial games or any games of any real scale made with the product for quite some time. Development is just too difficult and time consuming even if the feature set improves. Of course apparently this is not the objective for FPSC anyway - Commercial quality games I mean.


I presume by large scale level you refer to 40 x 40 tiles which is not a large level by any means though beyond the capability of FPSC currently if you want to fill it with commercial game type content. The FPS just wont stand it. I am currently approaching something near the limit in this direction it seems and have levels which require a great deal more detail added yet. Not sure I will make it at the moment.

Hopefully we may see some improvement in V1 if and when that becomes available.

I will continue for some time yet and would hope there may be some others that wont give up trying to achieve level production of something more than simple click together complexity.

Hi guys

I just wanted to acknowledge that I've encountered the problems you have mentioned and have been just as frustrated with these level design issues as well. At the moment I have a love/hate relationship with FPSC! The speed at which you can create a level and add entities and test is incredibly addictive, but it comes at the cost of advanced customisation.

One of my bug-bears is the automated interior/exterior walls creation. Try this: create a large room and then use the 'paint walls only' tool to create an enclosed area within this room. Both sides of the walls of this enclosed area are interior. Now use the area select tool to select these walls and select 'copy'. Move up a layer and left-click on top of the walls. Now one side is interior and the other exterior - frustrating!

My hope is that the level editing tools are tweaked to allow greater flexibility. I think Lee and the team have created something very special with this product and I can't wait to see the core improvements made in time for V1 (including a fully-functional segment and entity editor!)

Cheers
Chuckie

Not sure that any release of a stable segment or entity editor is on the cards for the future - as far as I am aware they are dropped permanently. Though that may be old thinking on the part of TGC I simply cant comment further.

There does not seem to be much of a TGC presence here at the Forum recently and there is little new information on progress of core element improvements towards V1. Concentration seems to be on Physics and Multiplayer which of themselves are most welcome though are of little benefit in dealing with difficulties with level creation and its playability ( e.g. problems with FPS, speed, memory issues and lagg).

In any case any new release of the segment editor would not be fully helpful unless it solves the current problem facing users mentioned here as it would just do what you can achieve now using hard work more quickly but the problems of texture inheritance would persist unless the way faces of segments are recognised is changed to become flexible in its use.