Fundamental flaw in the engine ?

Rudy.cz

<div class="IPBDescription">Inches vs. meters</div>It is known, that editor's default units inches are converted in to the meters when stored in .level file. This means that coordinates of all the vertexes in level are not whole numbers but real numbers with alot of going on after the decimal point (we like to call them "hairy numbers" here in Czech - nightmare of every Engineer).

This means that after reloading the map there is a lot of uncontroled movement of vertexes by a very small lenght caused by rouding of those "hairy numbers". This results in geometry never standing "on grid" and causing your preciously aligned textures to randomly float around. Sometimes it causes a face to become "coplanar" (remember Hammer?) setting its texture aligment totally off.

The question is: Will switching editor units to meters solve this issues or not?

Kouji_San

The game itself is running in meters, but if you change from inches to meters after you've done all the stuff in inches first. Beware of stuff being deformed and off grid, its quite annoying actually. maybe they should simply remove the inches from the game and go completely metric...

Rudy.cz

Yeah thats the thing, the inches -> meters conversion deforms all.

Unfortunatelly, most of the people (inscluding me) are used to current "inches" from Hammer times - 8/16 units for trims, 128/160 for wall etc.

I am wondering how they are going to solve this.

Emoo

All the textures, props and mapping guidelines are based off inches as well. It's extra work trying to map with meters.

john_b

im trying to figure out how to make a doorway properly nevermind this advanced math stuff

owww my brain hurts :(

Dragon-Guard

to be honest, being European i would love a metric editor.
Mapping in inches has always felt awkward to me, having to remember the specific units vs knowing all the real world (metric) values those units are based on (I have a degree in construction).

Rudy.cz

Its about mindset :) For me mapping is like different world with different dimensions not related with reality. Instead of centi/deci/mili/kilo -meters I am used to 8/64/256/1024 units and I dont feel nothing wrong about it. Actually mapping in metric will be very confusing for me :-D

hozz

I fully support UWE using international standard units, even though they are a US-based company. Very commendable :p

Rudy.cz

Here is a screenshot demostrating this "coplanar" problem with texture aligment.

<img src="https://dl.dropbox.com/u/62994473/ns2_bug05.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />

As you can see according to the gizmo and texture coords the texture shouldn't be rotated but it is. This is caused by one of the vertexes of that face that is slightly higher by the others, thus making that face not planar.

The only solution to this is to move all of the vertexes on Z-axis up and down back to the grid. I cannot use snap-to grid here because I have created those curves by rotating and their X,Y coords are not supposed to be on grid.

It is really ######ing annoying!

deathshroud

if you have everything built with snap to grid does it still do this or is it only with vertices that are not aligned to any sort of grid that mgiht move slightly.

Rudy.cz

It will also happen with vertexes that were intialy snaped to grid, they will just wander off...

GiGaBiTe

I'd like to see the editor stay with imperial measurement. I've been making maps since 1997, and every map editor for every game I've made maps for has always used imperial (inches, feet, yards). Switching to metric (a measurement system I hate regardless) would make scaling things much more difficult and basically turn all those years of experience upside down needlessly. I think instead it should be looked into why the map is being converted between measurement formats upon compile, it doesn't make much sense.

NS1 used imperial units (Half-Life) for the world, while using metric measurements in-game, and that system worked fine. In the 6 or so years that game was popular, I never heard a complaint about it, likely because everyone was already used to creating maps using imperial units.

WhiteDevil

I think the problem here is just how the editor handles the saving. There's hardly anything that can be called an inch or a centimeter in a game engine, they are just units.