Review of DLTCEP area making Options

[Sir-Kill]

I'm going through Yovaneth's tutorial on area creation using DLTCEP. (I'll be writing this as I go). I was a diehard IETME user but this tutorial is changing my mind.

Starting the WED file:
By following the TUT. this is prety straight foward Yovaneth did a much better job at writing this tutorial IMO than the one for IETME

The Search Map:
I had to do a bunch of excevicive left clicking before I found the trick and the eye strain seeing all the 0's was a bit difficult to deal with at first. but overall it has its perks and it is fairly easy to do.

The Light Map:
"Those who are watching closely will have spotted a change between image 3 and image 10 - image 10 has gained shadows from the pillars."
I think that is supposed to be Image 5 and image 12
well My first impression of the light map was there is no way that I was going to ever atempt to do this BUT DLTCEP has a good way of being able to change to the color you want by the Edit Pallete button (I have my image open in psp and use my dropper to find out the color I want)

The Search Map: very nice

Wallgroups: once I got used to the polygons it was not much different than IETME. only one big problem the shaking of the screen every time I click a for a new vertex it would shake causing more eye strain. This is probably do to DLTCEP keeping the vertex centered on the screen.

The 2da Master Area file and beyond: skiped for now.

From what I have done with this tut. on DLTCEP, I will now be using DLTCEP. A big thanks to Avenger for making (and his continued support for) DLTCEP and Yovaneth for making it useable to me.

this was the area basics more to come later.

This post has been edited by Sir-Kill: Sep 21 2005, 07:51 PM

[Vlad]

Well, I also read this tutorial, very nice tutorial by the way (credits to Yovaneth for detail explanations of what area editing can be done with DLTCEP), but I'm still confused with all that zeroes, tile settings and vertex calculations. I've never worked with tiles in IETME while creating my areas by the way. It's not that I don't know what is it but I find it's a bit confusing and complicated and I cannot realise why not to use simple drawing IETME tools instead for all your area graphics. If I were a programmer I would make an effort to improve (+bug fixing) the existing and very nice tool such as IETME instead of making a new area editor which doesn't possess functionality of the old one.

This post has been edited by Vlad: Sep 29 2005, 06:14 PM

[hlidskialf]

DLTCEP has far more functionality than IETME. It's just "different" in it's setup and perhaps a little harder to learn. However, the more complicated tasks you add the more complicated the tool is going to be. Not to mention that DLTCEP does all IE editing, not just areas!
You should try building just one area with it Vlad, everything that seems a little "off" will fall into place rather quickly.

[Meira]

I used IETME to create areas and quite frankly it was a nightmare. I'm sure it was partly my fault too, being new to it and all...

I haven't tried with DLTCEP yet, but I've browsed Yovaneth's tutorials and it looks very promising.

[Vlad]

Hlid, may be I am wrong and of course it's a matter of personal taste, but I prefer graphic editors where you can become an artist just with a few mouse clicks . It's nice that I can draw walls, doors, search map, triggers and containers around any background picture without thinking about technical sides of the area creation.

Meira, IETME requires good system resources. Actually there is probably a memory leak in the program because it consumes almost all system cache. When I have tried to make areas with IETME in my old Pentium 3 notebook, it was also a nightmare. However in my high-end AMD with 64-bit OS it works like a dream.

This post has been edited by Vlad: Oct 2 2005, 10:35 AM

[Avenger_teambg]

Vlad, DLTCEP was designed mostly for Max (Po) and MaxGraphics, they made original area art via 3dsmax and used DLTCEP to convert the area art to IE fileformats.
Wallgrouping is easier in DLTCEP, at least for me. IETME doesn't allow modification of a polygon.

And, i think creating an overlay is also easier by setting up the overlay polygon instead of fumbling with a brush.

The aux. map editor is not the most artistic, i agree. It was designed to be more precise than IETME was, so you can't walk across walls, etc.
It was also designed in anticipation of a 3dsmax plugin which creates the lightmap/heightmap on the fly when rendering the area graphics.

The fact that you can see the tile information in DLTCEP doesn't mean you MUST care about it. You can create perfect areas without ever looking at the tile info
Actually, only BG1 has animated tiles, so you can totally ignore that.

This post has been edited by Avenger_teambg: Oct 3 2005, 08:37 AM

[Avenger_teambg]

Sir-kill: i think there is an option to not center on the new vertex. So you can disable the screen shaking

[Meira]

Meira, IETME requires good system resources. Actually there is probably a memory leak in the program because it consumes almost all system cache. When I have tried to make areas with IETME in my old Pentium 3 notebook, it was also a nightmare. However in my high-end AMD with 64-bit OS it works like a dream.

Well, my problems with IETME were centred mainly around there things:

1. Corruption and colour transformation in graphics - I seem to remember that this was somehow avoidable, though... It's been a year and a half since, so I'm getting a bit hazy on the details....
2. Door crashing. If anything else was altered after adding a door the door became corrupted an crashed the game. I worked around this issue by adding doors last. But of course due being inexperienced I kept forgetting to do things, which meant that I had to go back to the save before adding doors.
3. Having to do the wall groups over and over again because they didn't function properly (ie. character appearing to be in front of the wall group instead being on the back and vice versa).

Again it might be just because I couldn't operate the program properly, but I'm definitely trying out DLTCEP to see if I can do better with that. Which is not saying that IETME wasn't a valuable tool back then.

And to save me from being totally off topic: Maybe you can keep an eye for if similar issues are a problem with DLTCEP Sir-Kill?. I'm especially interested if adding doors is easier.

[Avenger_teambg]

Meira, i managed to add doors with dltcep and ietme too.
But in ietme crashes were inevitable after a while.
The colour problem could have been fixed in ietme if you set the desktop colour to 24 bits/pixel.

[Valiant]

Hi guys

Well, about DLTCEP and IETME... It´s really very difficult to say which one of them is better. We all are different, and everyone has a different opinion on this. For example, I´m using both of them. In DLTCEP, I´m creating things like .are, .wed, .mos and .tis. For auxiliary maps, I´m definetly using IETME... I don´t know, I just hate clicking festival in DLTCEP... But, when you creating some very compicated overlay, DLTCEP with its fuction for turning polygons into overlay is very useful... also it´s very useful when you creating doors. It´s little bit compicated, but at least doors made in DLTCEP are allways working, and BG don´t crash....

That´s my point of view....

Valiant