Epic GTA2 Map Editor (0.6.6602) Beta

Anything to do with GTA1/GTA2 modding (tools, scripts and more).
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

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Cuban-Pete wrote:Ok, this is exactly your color. I can't get smaller one sharper in my program (GIMP). If you don't like it (I attached in zip vector file, large version and icon) you could adjust it if you want. :)
icon2.png
sure you can resize it, i could resize it too, just move it 1 pixel right, then resize the image, if its still blurry, move 1 more pixel at right and resize image again.
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

Post by Cuban-Pete »

TradeMark wrote:
Cuban-Pete wrote:Ok, this is exactly your color. I can't get smaller one sharper in my program (GIMP). If you don't like it (I attached in zip vector file, large version and icon) you could adjust it if you want. :)
icon2.png
sure you can resize it, i could resize it too, just move it 1 pixel right, then resize the image, if its still blurry, move 1 more pixel at right and resize image again.
?

Sorry, but what has moving it 1 pixel to do with resizing and sharpness? :roll: There just don't fit more pixels in 16x16 and surely no text like MAP or editor...
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

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Cuban-Pete wrote:Sorry, but what has moving it 1 pixel to do with resizing and sharpness? :roll: There just don't fit more pixels in 16x16 and surely no text like MAP or editor...
it depends which position the pixels are, the resizing will take average, see below image:

Image
here the image at right has been moved one pixel to right and it gets blurred when resized 4x smaller because it doesnt fit in one pixel in x-axis.

also if you resize it incorrectly, for example you should always get integer from the division, or else you may get blurred resize. so 64->32->16 works fine, but 63->32 fucks up.
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

Post by BenMillard »

It's a very exciting development. Even more so now we got our grubby little mits on it! :D

Don't have a nervous breakdown with all these bugfixes and releases, though. Pace yourself, walk around a nature reserve or something. Taking a break and returning with a clear head is often more productive than toiling in obscurity to correct small bug hard-to-fix annoyances until crazy o'clock all the time.

That's my experience, anyway. Then again, sometimes you can "get in the groove" and achieve more in one night than the whole previous month. Look after yourself, is all I'm saying.

Oh, it's cool to see the never-quite-finished multiplayer level from Illspirit getting some attention. Often considered finishing it off for him. The converted GTA1 Vice City comes from Delfi/JernejL's "Tanks in Miami" mod? Where did you get it? Is there a GTA1 Liberty City as well? (I'm aware of and helped with San Andreas Scramble.)
TradeMark wrote:I decided to make a new release for a while now. BenMillard, see if this fixes the problems (if the "novsync.txt" didnt fix it).
It loaded when I added this file! I just copied and renamed the minimapfix.txt file.
  • It seemed to take a long time to start.
  • Indicating the progress and saying what it's doing is good. Otherwise I might have thought it froze.
  • If you can refine this to produce a progress bar, that would be even better. (Maybe count the number of *.mmp files, then track your progress through them? Could even say "Gathering data for map x of y, Map Description.")
  • It successfully found my installed maps from the GH setting.
  • I think the message box announcing that worked is unnecessary, once the program becomes more stable.
  • When I started moving mouse over the Tile Selector, it was very unresponsive. (Like moving the mouse down a long navigation list in IE6 10 years ago.)
  • It was using maximum CPU all the time, even when idle.
  • I tried single-clicking and double-clicking on the map in top left. Camera didn't move, nothing seemed to happen. (I thought it would be like the mini-map in top right of DMA editor. It's a very fast way to move between districts.)
  • I've attached a bunch of screenshots in a ZIP file. If you want different columns shown, just ask. I had to use JPEG for screenshots with the water, because PNG is several MB for big patterned areas.
  • It closed very quickly.
I had no idea how to do anything in it. I was moving the mouse, hold right button, holding Ctrl, everything I am used to. Absolutely nothing happened. Maybe this is because it isn't working right on my machine? Either way: :(

The water looked really good. And I could see more than if I were using DMA editor. And the Tile Selector fills the left-hand side of the screen. And the UI is delightfully minimal. Yay x4! I agree with Cuban-Pete that a standard menu bar would help discover the more easily. Command line interface?! It's not 1970! ;)
TradeMark wrote:0.5.18 Beta (12.02.2010)
[...]
- Fixed instant crash on cards that didnt support v-sync (i hope).
Yep, now launched even without the novsync file. Somehow the progress messages seemed to run more smoothly. Maybe that's just because I noticed the number of dots increases this time. Or maybe it was re-using stuff it had figured out after the first run. Meh.
TradeMark wrote:- [...] (as the documents says lid flats should not be used if there is not transparency in those tiles).
I vaguely remember this made the solid wood stair tiles in Vedic Temple completely invisible for Salamander/DrSlony when he was running GTA2 in WINE. Turning off Flat for tiles without transparent parts made them re-appear. The stairs with see-through parts worked fine when Flat. (This was like a year ago, so I might be remembering wrong.)

There's a lot of "WTF" moments when you look closely at how people make their maps. Including the originals: just look inside any complex or mission-critical building. It's a complete mess from the copy-and-paste rebuilding work!
TradeMark wrote:i dont have an idea what does F10 do, it must be some windows related thing since i have not binded any key to F10 in my editor, so it should do nothing. it somehow takes focus out of the program when you press it...
F10 is a Windows standard shortcut which gives focus to the menu bar in Windows. If you press it in a window with no menu bar, it gives focus to the Control Box menu but doesn't open it. So F10 followed by DownArrow opens the Control Box in your map editor.

Shift+F10 gives the context menu for the control which has keyboard focus. When there is no context menu, it has no effect. (NOOP FTW!)

(EDIT) After reading docs for a while I started moving around. Used the Restore Down button so the viewport was a lot smaller and that seemed to double the performance. Still dominates my CPU, though.

Some issues with the controls seem obvious:
  • Middle button often requires quite some pressure to hold down. Was tiring my finger.
  • You can easily slip from middle button and change altitude by accident.
  • Moving by the arrows is a lot less flexible than moving by the mouse. You need hacks like accelerator keys to change speed. This will never be as easy or natural as changing the speed you are moving the mouse.
  • Mouse in DMA editor locks you to the edges of blocks, so movements are discrete. With unlimited draw distance, mouse could now give proper analogue movement. So you can put camera exactly where you want.
  • You could inherit the user's Mouse Speed and Mouse Acceleration settings to make mouse-based movement more natural.
  • The speed of motion in DMA editor is perfect, imho. It's just a bit limiting when you are locked to the blocks.
  • It's also a bit limiting when you are locked to 1FPS...is my machine really that out of date now? It was epic for it's time and has been upgraded since then. Runs the DMA editor smooth as silk, until you zoom into Vedic Temple and look through many layers of Flat tiles. Even then I hardly notice the slowdown.
Anyway, that's enough waffle. Here's something important. A DMA Editor versus TM Editor head-to-head fight for glory, taken from Army Base!

Image Image

Great job!! Really glad you released it.

Small bug: When two walls of Flat tiles touch, sometimes the furthest tile is drawn on top of the nearest tile. (Such as where the watchtowers in the corners meet the tall chain-link fence.) This also happens in DMA editor but doesn't happen in GTA2 game. If you could fix that in editor, it reduces the "oh shit I have to take that one again" moments when modders want to promote their level.
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BenMillard 2010-02-12 22-10.zip
Screenshots of loading and performance stuff from Task Manager. Includes both the versions mentioned.
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Last edited by BenMillard on 13 Feb 2010, 10:29, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

Post by Cuban-Pete »

Press ctrl+l (the L) and you get sharper view (but this might also be heavier on gpu). With l (L) you go to softer again.
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

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BenMillard wrote:Don't have a nervous breakdown with all these bugfixes and releases, though. Pace yourself, walk around a nature reserve or something. Taking a break and returning with a clear head is often more productive than toiling in obscurity to correct small bug hard-to-fix annoyances until crazy o'clock all the time.
yeah, i dont take pressure on this, its fun to dev it and find bugs and fix them :)
BenMillard wrote:
  • It seemed to take a long time to start.
  • Indicating the progress and saying what it's doing is good. Otherwise I might have thought it froze.
  • If you can refine this to produce a progress bar, that would be even better. (Maybe count the number of *.mmp files, then track your progress through them? Could even say "Gathering data for map x of y, Map Description.")
  • It successfully found my installed maps from the GH setting.
  • I think the message box announcing that worked is unnecessary, once the program becomes more stable.
  • When I started moving mouse over the Tile Selector, it was very unresponsive. (Like moving the mouse down a long navigation list in IE6 10 years ago.)
  • It was using maximum CPU all the time, even when idle.
  • I tried single-clicking and double-clicking on the map in top left. Camera didn't move, nothing seemed to happen. (I thought it would be like the mini-map in top right of DMA editor. It's a very fast way to move between districts.)
  • I've attached a bunch of screenshots in a ZIP file. If you want different columns shown, just ask. I had to use JPEG for screenshots with the water, because PNG is several MB for big patterned areas.
  • It closed very quickly.
What is your CPU speed and GFX card? you seem to have only 1 frame per second by looking at your screenshots :shock:

I've found out the CPU usage reason, and i am going to switch to some other method to lower the CPU.

.mmp files scanning doesnt take longer than 80ms for me, its not the bottleneck really, and displaying info of it would be waste of time. It doesnt open all the maps in memory as you would think by the load times :D Most time is used generating the minimap and sending the terrain data to GPU. This will be changed in the future when i switch to other rendering system.

What messagebox are you talking about?

Your mouse movement unresponse is because of the low FPS. try smaller window size to see if you get more FPS, i am afraid you dont have good opengl support, or your GFX card memory is really small and its switching from RAM to GPU all the time, or something like that.

Yeah it uses lots of CPU for me too (2 cores out of 4 :? ) im about to make idle CPU usage lower; pause it when the window is not visible or something like that.

Try to hold your click longer and see if you can click the minimap then (because you have only 1FPS it misses the click messages).

Are you using the latest release? i cant see the FPS counter on all your screenshots.


BenMillard wrote:I had no idea how to do anything in it. I was moving the mouse, hold right button, holding Ctrl, everything I am used to. Absolutely nothing happened. Maybe this is because it isn't working right on my machine? Either way: :(
read the readme.txt and look at camera controls, they are basically ASDW keys and F4 and mouse click and middle mouse click and mousewheel.
BenMillard wrote:I agree with Cuban-Pete that a standard menu bar would help discover the more easily. Command line interface?! It's not 1970! ;)
lol yeah, i made the command line because i ran out of buttons for different functions :lol: (you can use only like 50% of the functionality in these releases).
BenMillard wrote:There's a lot of "WTF" moments when you look closely at how people make their maps. Including the originals: just look inside any complex or mission-critical building. It's a complete mess from the copy-and-paste rebuilding work!
indeed! thats also what i want to fix: creating buildings should not leave trash inside them.
BenMillard wrote:(EDIT) After reading docs for a while I started moving around. Used the Restore Down button so the viewport was a lot smaller and that seemed to double the performance. Still dominates my CPU, though.
yeah you should always use the top-down view for most optimal performance since you have so low FPS.
BenMillard wrote: Some issues with the controls seem obvious:
  • Middle button often requires quite some pressure to hold down. Was tiring my finger.
  • You can easily slip from middle button and change altitude by accident.
  • Moving by the arrows is a lot less flexible than moving by the mouse. You need hacks like accelerator keys to change speed. This will never be as easy or natural as changing the speed you are moving the mouse.
  • Mouse in DMA editor locks you to the edges of blocks, so movements are discrete. With unlimited draw distance, mouse could now give proper analogue movement. So you can put camera exactly where you want.
  • You could inherit the user's Mouse Speed and Mouse Acceleration settings to make mouse-based movement more natural.
  • The speed of motion in DMA editor is perfect, imho. It's just a bit limiting when you are locked to the blocks.
  • It's also a bit limiting when you are locked to 1FPS...is my machine really that out of date now? It was epic for it's time and has been upgraded since then. Runs the DMA editor smooth as silk, until you zoom into Vedic Temple and look through many layers of Flat tiles. Even then I hardly notice the slowdown.
lol yeah i noticed middle mouse problem too, but i also noticed that i dont have to hold it down all the time ;) just fast click and move then done.

yeah i need some speed adjuster stuff there for camera.

i dont know whats up with your computer, might be just bad opengl drivers? check if you have opengl 1.4 support, thats what this thing should require.
Try to disable skybox (F3) and map grids (CTRL+X) and see if you get any more performance. Also remember to resize the window smaller to see if it gives more FPS.
Also try F1 to hide the left menu, it should give more FPS on slow cards.

BenMillard wrote:Small bug: When two walls of Flat tiles touch, sometimes the furthest tile is drawn on top of the nearest tile. (Such as where the watchtowers in the corners meet the tall chain-link fence.) This also happens in DMA editor but doesn't happen in GTA2 game. If you could fix that in editor, it reduces the "oh shit I have to take that one again" moments when modders want to promote their level.
yeah known bug, (z-fight for its real name) i'll see what i can do about it. First i need to re-do the rendering engine though.

Edit: can you also check whats your FPS when you disable left menu (F1) and disable map drawing (Z) and skybox (F3) and map grids (CTRL+X) on full screen size window and small window ?

Thanks for testing!
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

Post by Cuban-Pete »

TradeMark wrote:
Cuban-Pete wrote:Sorry, but what has moving it 1 pixel to do with resizing and sharpness? :roll: There just don't fit more pixels in 16x16 and surely no text like MAP or editor...
it depends which position the pixels are, the resizing will take average, see below image:

Image
here the image at right has been moved one pixel to right and it gets blurred when resized 4x smaller because it doesnt fit in one pixel in x-axis.

also if you resize it incorrectly, for example you should always get integer from the division, or else you may get blurred resize. so 64->32->16 works fine, but 63->32 fucks up.
I go from 640 pixel image to 64, 32 and 16. Add a sharpen filter, put them in different layers, save as .ico and that's it. I can't move pixels to right because than the image is different...
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

Post by BenMillard »

Another small rendering bug: When the camera is in certain positions, tiles look like they do not join each other. DMA Editor gets this a lot. GTA2 sometimes lets you see between blocks if there is a wall under them. Such as the edges of the subway in MultiSlayer (the main city version).

Since I had Army Base open, I took a screenshot of the effect. (Sorry for big PNG but I wanted you to see what I see.)
Blocks seem to have gaps between them when camera is in certain positions. Very similar effect as DMA Editor.
Blocks seem to have gaps between them when camera is in certain positions. Very similar effect as DMA Editor.
gaps.png (683.77 KiB) Viewed 35456 times
TradeMark wrote:What is your CPU speed and GFX card? you seem to have only 1 frame per second by looking at your screenshots :shock:
Sorry, meant to link to my PC's specs and upgrade history. Main stuff:
  • CPU: AMD Athlon 1400XP
  • GPU: 128MB ATi Radeon 9200SE
  • Motherboard: Asus A7A266 (266MHz AGP Pro/4×)
I included a screenshot of my drivers in an earlier message. I'm using really old drivers because anything newer was pathologically slow during explosions in GTA2. Or the game simply wouldn't display. Or the DMA Editor would display completely messed up.

When I upgraded my graphics card I went through 2 or 3 before finding a setup that works with this motherboard. AGP 4x is prehistoric by now. But the DMA Editor is perfectly smooth and so is the game, if I use these older drivers.

If I can use newer drivers to improve OpenGL support but keep good performance during explosions AND have DMA Editor and TM Editor render properly, that would be awesome. Advice welcome...so long as it's reversable!
TradeMark wrote:Most time is used generating the minimap and sending the terrain data to GPU.
Thanks for explaining. Looking at the messages more closely I see that now.
TradeMark wrote:What messagebox are you talking about?
One of my forst screenshots showed it. When the program first ran, the image called startup novsync 1.png shows the box which says "Maps were not found from maplist.txt." This seems useless, as the normal startup experience is that it finds your files via GTA2 Game Hunter or from another registry key.

In general, message boxes are only useful if they are asking you to make an urgent choice. When closing a program after you changed something but didn't save, it's useful to get "Save this unsaved file? Yes/No/Cancel."

Maybe this message box is useful for debugging...but then it should be logged to that debug file, imho.
TradeMark wrote:try smaller window size to see if you get more FPS, i am afraid you dont have good opengl support, or your GFX card memory is really small and its switching from RAM to GPU all the time, or something like that.
Smaller window roughly doubles the refresh speed but it's still about 1 FPS. Reducing altitude but keeping the default top-down view increases FPS a lot.

When viewing MultiSlayer, maximum FPS I can get is "FPS: 005 009". Viewing a 1x1 area is the same as a 5x5 area. Anything more than that starts slowing down a little. A 10x9 area gave me "FPS: 004 008". I think every tile uses same palette and there are very few tiles in use, since pavements don't have edges and walls don't have as many versions. It's generally a simpler style.

Closing GTA2 Game Hunter sometimes increases FPS by 1 value. Probably when it's 4.9 FPS it becomes 5.05 or something, nothing major.

Oh, I can get "FPS: 027 / 040" if I reduce altitude, move to the edge of the level and then turn to face empty black space.
TradeMark wrote:Yeah it uses lots of CPU for me too (2 cores out of 4 :? ) im about to make idle CPU usage lower; pause it when the window is not visible or something like that.
If the camera isn't moving and the user does nothing, ideally it would use 1% or less.
TradeMark wrote:Try to hold your click longer and see if you can click the minimap then (because you have only 1FPS it misses the click messages).
Ah, good idea. That works! I like holding the button down and dragging around. I think left-click is much more natural for this. Right-clicking on a picture always makes me expect a context menu.
TradeMark wrote:Are you using the latest release? i cant see the FPS counter on all your screenshots.
Some were from the previous version, for comparison. The ones with FPS are the most recent version.
TradeMark wrote:read the readme.txt and look at camera controls, they are basically ASDW keys and F4 and mouse click and middle mouse click and mousewheel.
If they re-used the controls I knew then I would instantly be able to move around. Instead it took many minutes to find out how and about an hour for it to start feeling at all natural.
TradeMark wrote:yeah you should always use the top-down view for most optimal performance since you have so low FPS.
Pressing T seems to have no effect, even when I held it down. Is that the default view already?
TradeMark wrote:i dont know whats up with your computer, might be just bad opengl drivers? check if you have opengl 1.4 support, thats what this thing should require.
Hopefully the extra info helps you identify for me. Is there a test for OpenGL 1.4 support I could run?
TradeMark wrote:Try to disable skybox (F3) and map grids (CTRL+X) and see if you get any more performance. Also remember to resize the window smaller to see if it gives more FPS. Also try F1 to hide the left menu, it should give more FPS on slow cards.
Ctrl+X improved performance maybe by 20%. Didn't notice much change from the other advice. Making the window smaller seems to give the biggest improvement. I get "FPS: 002 / 002" nearly all the time with a window of 800x600.

Could you store the window size and whether it was in Maximise or Restore Down mode when it is closed, please? Then I can always start it at 800x600.
TradeMark wrote:Edit: [...] and disable map drawing (Z)
When I pressed this, I still saw the map but got infinite water around it. That halved performance. Pressing it again gave me the default view, with "FPS: 002 / 002" nearly all the time. It seems Ctrl isn't necessary for the "Infinite Water" feature?

I pressed and held F5 for "render whole map on/off" but it seemed to have no effect. Pressed and held 1 for "rendering range -1" but this also seemed to have no effect. Tried pressing and holding F5 and 1 in different sequences but no change. Also tried holding Ctrl while pressing them, still no effect.

Tried pressing and holding F but this didn't display any debug information, that I could see.


(EDIT) I love how the aspect ratio is always correct, even if the window dimensions are irregular! And the rendering quality is as good as actually playing GTA2...so much better to see the levels in their real, full colours! Also love how fast it closes.

Double-clicking .mmp files to open the level with correct .sty is super sweet. The later loading messages seem to get written over the first two when opening levels this way, though. Maybe it's just a slow refresh on this machine.

I couldn't get player start positions to show up. Was opening a .mmp from the folder where I build my levels, so it had the right .mis and .scr in the same folder. How does that effect look?

(EDIT2) It seems the .sty has to be in same folder as .mmp when you open a level that way. That's kinda lame, because it means I have to copy bil.sty to the folders where I build new versions of Army Base and DeCon Labs.

That increases the risk of modders accidentally including a .sty file in their download, by accident, since it was all in the folder.

If you don't find a file in the folder the .mmp was in, maybe you could search the GTA2\data folder? You have the paths in the [DIR] lines your editor generates. Or the ones modders add themselves.
Last edited by BenMillard on 13 Feb 2010, 11:42, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

Post by T.M. »

Cuban-Pete wrote:I go from 640 pixel image to 64, 32 and 16. Add a sharpen filter, put them in different layers, save as .ico and that's it. I can't move pixels to right because than the image is different...
sure you can move it right, just do it man! you can do it! :D when youre done moving, you can crop it back to original square and add padding etc
Last edited by T.M. on 13 Feb 2010, 12:06, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

Post by BenMillard »

Time for another DMA versus TM side-by-side comparison!™ (Try to guess which is which. The level shown is DeCon Labs.)

Image Image

Do I need to turn up the sharpness or something? The black logos on the sandbags in the foreground are almost invisible. Gotta say, the DMA Editor and the game show more detail when close-up like this.

Also, GTA2 shows those black and silver pipes a lot lighter. Like, you can see loads more detail in the black areas. DMA Editor and TM Editor both hardly show anything in those black areas.

TM's editor shows all the walkways, stairs and towers of the Zaibatsu Power Plant in the background, though. The DMA Editor cropped some of them.

I didn't play with the really advanced settings. It seems there's something different about the perspective default in DMA Editor versus TM Editor? I tried really hard but couldn't quite make them match! (The foreground and right-hand side are closer than the left side and far distance.)
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

Post by T.M. »

BenMillard wrote:Another small rendering bug: When the camera is in certain positions, tiles look like they do not join each other. DMA Editor gets this a lot. GTA2 sometimes lets you see between blocks if there is a wall under them. Such as the edges of the subway in MultiSlayer (the main city version).
Oh, that is fixed when you use better GFX card that supports larger than 2048x2048 texture sizes ;) Maybe i will make support to 2048x2048 sizes too... dunno.
BenMillard wrote:When I upgraded my graphics card I went through 2 or 3 before finding a setup that works with this motherboard. AGP 4x is prehistoric by now. But the DMA Editor is perfectly smooth and so is the game, if I use these older drivers.
indeed :shock: maybe you should buy new computer XD you can get better laptop with just 400€.
BenMillard wrote:
TradeMark wrote:What messagebox are you talking about?
One of my forst screenshots showed it. When the program first ran, the image called startup novsync 1.png shows the box which says "Maps were not found from maplist.txt." This seems useless, as the normal startup experience is that it finds your files via GTA2 Game Hunter or from another registry key.
Hmm, yeah perhaps, i had to add message because so many people didnt understand maplist.txt is the key. But you are right, that maplist.txt thing is going to be obsolete soon and wont have such message then.
BenMillard wrote:Smaller window roughly doubles the refresh speed but it's still about 1 FPS. Reducing altitude but keeping the default top-down view increases FPS a lot.
Hmm, i think i can increase your performance when i switch to other rendering method. I noticed that old cards sucks at this method i use, but new cards its fucking fast. (or was it just ATI vs Nvidia problem, probably XD)
BenMillard wrote:Closing GTA2 Game Hunter sometimes increases FPS by 1 value. Probably when it's 4.9 FPS it becomes 5.05 or something, nothing major.
Hmm. try to close all open windows and see if it increases the FPS, you might have just bad windows settings, i think your FPS might become higher in fullscreen... do you play GTA2 fullscreen?
BenMillard wrote:Ah, good idea. That works! I like holding the button down and dragging around. I think left-click is much more natural for this. Right-clicking on a picture always makes me expect a context menu.
my editor uses right click for all map selections, and left click selects area with mouse, i probably add possibility to select areas of the map on the minimaps so you can edit faster the crap out of the edges etc...
BenMillard wrote:Pressing T seems to have no effect, even when I held it down. Is that the default view already?
yeah T is default view, press F to see debug info and if the triangles counter doesnt get lower when you zoom in the map, then its rendering whole map probably, and thats why lags (F5 whole map render on/(off).
BenMillard wrote: Is there a test for OpenGL 1.4 support I could run?
hmm. not what i know, maybe i can make one... dunno.
BenMillard wrote:Ctrl+X improved performance maybe by 20%. Didn't notice much change from the other advice. Making the window smaller seems to give the biggest improvement. I get "FPS: 002 / 002" nearly all the time with a window of 800x600.
I think your problem is no opengl support and your CPU is rendering everything, thats what i get when i havent installed my GFX card drivers, fucking slow games, CPU usage full, etc.
BenMillard wrote:Could you store the window size and whether it was in Maximise or Restore Down mode when it is closed, please? Then I can always start it at 800x600.
yeah sure, ill add to todo list.
BenMillard wrote:
TradeMark wrote:Edit: [...] and disable map drawing (Z)
When I pressed this, I still saw the map but got infinite water around it. That halved performance. Pressing it again gave me the default view, with "FPS: 002 / 002" nearly all the time. It seems Ctrl isn't necessary for the "Infinite Water" feature?
o.O dont use infinite water, it will make your performance even worser i think XD
BenMillard wrote:Tried pressing and holding F but this didn't display any debug information, that I could see.
oh, i see, yep, todo: better font rendering.
BenMillard wrote:Double-clicking .mmp files to open the level with correct .sty is super sweet. The later loading messages seem to get written over the first two when opening levels this way, though. Maybe it's just a slow refresh on this machine.
its intentional that they gets written over, well not really but it looks cool :roll:
BenMillard wrote:I couldn't get player start positions to show up. Was opening a .mmp from the folder where I build my levels, so it had the right .mis and .scr in the same folder. How does that effect look?
are you sure you pressed numpad 4 ?
BenMillard wrote:(EDIT2) It seems the .sty has to be in same folder as .mmp when you open a level that way. That's kinda lame, because it means I have to copy bil.sty to the folders where I build new versions of Army Base and DeCon Labs.
yeah been thinking i should support the GTA2 folder for those 3 sty files... added to todo lits ;)
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

Post by T.M. »

BenMillard wrote:Do I need to turn up the sharpness or something? The black logos on the sandbags in the foreground are almost invisible. Gotta say, the DMA Editor and the game show more detail when close-up like this.
I dont think the sharpness function helps you at all since you are not using mipmapping i think? you can try pressing CTRL+L and see if it has any effect. For me it renders them perfectly, no blurry at all. I dont have any idea why your textures are that blurred, did you take those pics when camera was very far away from the map?
BenMillard wrote:Also, GTA2 shows those black and silver pipes a lot lighter. Like, you can see loads more detail in the black areas. DMA Editor and TM Editor both hardly show anything in those black areas.
oh, weird, dunno really why. i copied my lighting settings by screenshots from GTA2, so it should be exactly same (though, i changed some lighting to less dark ones...)
BenMillard wrote:I didn't play with the really advanced settings. It seems there's something different about the perspective default in DMA Editor versus TM Editor? I tried really hard but couldn't quite make them match! (The foreground and right-hand side are closer than the left side and far distance.)
yeah, well does everything have to look like DMA editor after all.
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

Post by Gustavob »

I get more fps when I resize window too, look:

Image
as you might know I usually have 8/7 fps

I also seem to get more FPS in top down view than in 3d view

Image

Something else: the closer I am from the ground, more FPS I get:

Image

but that must be normal, huh?
You just lost the game.
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

Post by Cuban-Pete »

I get FPS1 100 and FPS2 170 at 1680x1050 on my HD4870. Making program smaller has no effect in 3D. If you have top-down (T) it does get a lot faster in 3D and more faster in top-down.
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

Post by T.M. »

Yeah i already explained its normal. Look at the triangles counter next to FPS, you see how your FPS is fully comparable to the amount of triangles rendered.

Btw you should not install any games on "my documents" folder or something like that... speeds up your screenshotting when you dont have to censor everything ;)

Also you can make the non-top-down mode faster if you press F5 and use 1 and 2 to adjust the rendered rectangle size.
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

Post by Razor »

Gustavob dragonball.mmp? :D
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

Post by Gustavob »

Razor wrote:Gustavob dragonball.mmp? :D
http://gtamp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f= ... p=631#p631 that one is Heri's modification of "Peds Rain 2" (he sent it to me and I was thinking of "remodificating" it and adding money when the "punched" ped dies it adds +20 score for player (in both scripts). Heri's modification makes ped explode instantly when punched, but if you punch him and he falls down he wont fly, so you have to do the punch in a certain way. He said it looks a bit like dragonball's "kamehameha" so he named script and mmp "dragonball")
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

Post by Razor »

link is broken and would you like to send me this script? :D
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

Post by BenMillard »

Here are some screenshots of MultiSlayer City using TM's Editor. Purely to show off the draw distance. The big versions are 1600x1200 JPEG, about 300-500kB each.

Image Image Image Image Image

F11 for true fullscreen view, please. (F11 or Esc would take you back to normal view.) :)
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Re: TradeMark's GTA2 Map Editor (only Zone Editor currently)

Post by T.M. »

Small changes again:

------------------------------------
0.5.185 Beta (14.02.2010)
------------------------------------
- Fixed highly unlikely crash when no .mmp files were found from the default gta2 folder.

- Fixed broken zone renaming (opened command line instead of applying zone name changes).

- Players start positions rendering is enabled by default now (disable by numpad4). If you cannot see the player start positions, try to zoom out of the map to see whole map and disable map drawing (Z), if no white points seen, then you probably are missing the correct .mis file. Press numpad 4 to disable and enable again to see if that is true. (pops up error message when the .mis file was not found).

- Added "keep weapons after death" cheat in TEST command.

- Added setting: file "nocambox.txt" disables minimap camera rendering (should make your CPU usage a lot lower, but on some CPU's the free camera mode will look laggy when rotating left/right.).

- Added setting: file "fullscreen.txt", launches editor in fullscreen using maximum resolution. you can set own resolution in the file: first line in the file is width, second is height. will also notify which resolution it is going to use.

- Added program icon, thanks to Cuban-Pete.

----------



Cuban-Pete, can you fix the ico file? the sizes arent standard, should be 16x16, 32x32, 64x64 i think. thats probably also why it looks blurred... i tried to edit it with two programs and both said "INCORRECT SIZE!" and when i tried to import the big PNG they both said same lol. I cant edit alpha PNG images, otherwise i would have created new icon from the big PNG :/

BenMillard, try new release and create file "nocambox.txt" and if it doesnt fix your super low FPS, then try it with fullscreen by creating file "fullscreen.txt", you can change fullscreen resolution by adding the width and height in two separate lines in the file. Also remember to disable skybox, infinite water, map grids, left menu. just like last time you did.

BenMillard, you should also disable mipmapping, since your screenshots looks really ugly in the farthest areas. Create file "nomipmap.txt" to fix that.
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