Are there better ways of organising assets while mapping?

Ask questions about mapping in general, and show off your in-progress work.
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Veyrdite
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Are there better ways of organising assets while mapping?

Post by Veyrdite »

Unvanq seems to layer all pk3s at the same spot in a virtual filesystem, where all textures end up in /textures, maps in /maps, etc. I assume this is how Quake did it because it brings advantages such as being able to 'displace' files from one pk3 with newer ones from another (for eg updates).

For maps however it's a little messy. Map pk3 resources are generally (AFAIK) like a 'local' resource, because maps don't seem to have dependencies on one-another, but they get piled together anyway. The maps by other people I have looked at try to neaten things a little by storing their resources in subdirectories of the top level ones (like /textures and /maps). For example: Nano stores its textures in /textures/nano .

None of this really matters for players, however it requires mappers to either keep one project's resources spread across many folders in their ~/.unvanquished equivalent or compress everything into a pk3 every time a change is made. This is driving me crazy.

Keep in mind I come from a game dev environment where almost everything is done through as single IDE-like tool :P. During this process all map resources are in their own neat directory, not inversely spread across others, with only a single layer of resource inheritance.

Am I doing things in a silly way? Have I failed to notice some really obvious way around this? At the moment all I can think of is fuse-mounting a pk3 as a folder neatly holding things. Hopefully the filesystem rehaul mentioned in the latest news update will be nice. I'm probably turning this into more of a headache than it needs to be anyway.

Thankyou if you can help :)

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Viech
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Re: Are there better ways of organising assets while mapping

Post by Viech »

pk3dirs are what you're looking for. They are like pk3s, except they are folders:

Code: Select all

% ls ~/.Unvanquished/main/parpax.pk3dir 
about/  gfx/  levelshots/  maps/  minimaps/  scripts/  sound/  textures/

Responsible for: Arch Linux package & torrent distribution, Parpax (map), Chameleon (map texture editor), Sloth (material file generator), gameplay design & programming, artistic direction

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Veyrdite
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Re: Are there better ways of organising assets while mapping

Post by Veyrdite »

Thankyou!

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kharnov
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Re: Are there better ways of organising assets while mapping

Post by kharnov »

What are you working on, if you don't mind me asking? By the way, you can always idle on our development channel. It's #unvanquished-dev on Freenode.

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Veyrdite
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Re: Are there better ways of organising assets while mapping

Post by Veyrdite »

kharnov wrote:

What are you working on, if you don't mind me asking? By the way, you can always idle on our development channel. It's #unvanquished-dev on Freenode.

Thanks Kharnov -- I did not even think of using IRC. It would probably be much better suited for solving trivial questions like this :)

Although my end goal is to remake Niveus, I'm familiar with game engines and environments extremely different to quake derivatives. I'm speeding my learning curve up quite a bit by having a go at writing a guide for people (like me) uninitiated in the ways of the brush:

https://unvanquished.net/wiki/index.php/Sandbox:Mapping (extremely WIP)

In other words: don't expect me to finish Niveus within a month :) Sorry Tom

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kharnov
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Re: Are there better ways of organising assets while mapping

Post by kharnov »

Nice. I like where this is going!

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Viech
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Re: Are there better ways of organising assets while mapping

Post by Viech »

Cool! If you want to see your remake as an official map there are a few requirements and things to keep in mind. Talk to me on IRC if you're interested.

Responsible for: Arch Linux package & torrent distribution, Parpax (map), Chameleon (map texture editor), Sloth (material file generator), gameplay design & programming, artistic direction

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Tom
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Re: Are there better ways of organising assets while mapping

Post by Tom »

Veyrdite wrote:

In other words: don't expect me to finish Niveus within a month :) Sorry Tom

No problem. :smile: Take your time. A remake of quality takes time, and I am someone patient.

Viech wrote:

Cool! If you want to see your remake as an official map there are a few requirements and things to keep in mind. Talk to me on IRC if you're interested.

This may also interest someone else, perhaps you can paste this conversation somewhere. :cool:

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Viech
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Re: Are there better ways of organising assets while mapping

Post by Viech »

Tom wrote:
Viech wrote:

Cool! If you want to see your remake as an official map there are a few requirements and things to keep in mind. Talk to me on IRC if you're interested.

This may also interest someone else, perhaps you can paste this conversation somewhere. :cool:

Sure, I should also write a post on map requirements at some point (until now there were just not enough mappers for this to make any sense).

Responsible for: Arch Linux package & torrent distribution, Parpax (map), Chameleon (map texture editor), Sloth (material file generator), gameplay design & programming, artistic direction

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