Darkness on B5 maps

[smacky]

The 20090822 map maker released today handles map darkness slightly differently from, and is therefore incompatible with, previous releases.

Well actually it's not that black and white. The nitty-gritty is here: http://www.daimonin.org/forums/daimonin-project/map-darkness-setting/

So you'll want to double check your existing maps to make sure darkness is properly set.

This is simple. In Gridarta, load the map file and open the properties window. Check the darkness field:



0 means total darkness, 1 to 7 are decreasing levels of darkness, -1 means server default (which ATM is 7).

Basically in previous releases Gridarta would say 0 but the server would interpret this as -1 (so 7). This meant that Gridarta could not produce total dark maps. Now, 0 means 0.

So you need to make sure that your maps have the actual darkness setting you mean.

For outdoors maps (which have variable lighting over the course of a day_, darkness is the maximum ambient light level. So a darkness 4 outdoors map will never get very bright even at midday. For outdoors maps darkness 0 makes no sense then so this will be ignored.

Lippy has already upgraded all the maps on the SVNs (ie, the Map Wizard's maps and all the official maps) and the dev server is rebuilt.

So Map Wizards should be sure to update their maps to the latest SVN before committing anything.

For mappers whose maps are not on SVN, you'll need to edit the darkness on existing maps as above to be sure before your maps will work properly. New maps, generated by 20090822 will be fine.

[evilasa]

Any idea why the new version can't find my maps, even when i route it by clicking ( when I route it on the options page )? It gets a bit annoying trawling through about 6 files for the mapset I want. I've tried re-starting the MM, but I just get the message "Artifact definition file cannot be read";  it loads aftifacts ok, but then links to my mapset route with this error at the end "The system cannot find the path specified". And yes I've routed the right box to the right place lols, it was working fine this morning on the last MM release...

[grommit]

Well, you've totally lost me with that post

[smacky]

Me too. On the darkness thing, I've fixed the public maps that got missed, so we'll probably ought to release an updated mapmaker at some point anyway. So Evil: wha'? If this is a real bug we should fix that too before the rerelease.

(I also fixed the maps on mapserv that got missed, except the unofficial ones).

[evilasa]

Having just read it again, it lost me!

Basically, when you go to load a map, it looks for them in a folder it's been told to look in from the options menu ( map-maker trunk/maps being the default ). When I try to change it to my working copy, it tells me it can't find it. I can, it's there on the desktop, in front of me. All I'm doing is giving the options screen directions by clicking the path to the folder, but for some reason it seems to get lost...

...on top of that, there seems to be a problem with it's ability to find anything at all, and it's probably down to the same thing, whatever that is. Example:-
When you want to link one map to the next one along, you click on the browse button and click on the file/path to the file that you want. It doesn't like this ( and it's at this point I think it could be Lippy's dodgy darkness repairing :p ) because it will forget the file you clicked on entirely if the file doesn't end in 4 numbers, or only remember that last about 7 or 8 digits of the name/path if it does. Exactly the same thing happens when you're trying to give portals/exits their destination.

[Mizza]

...Basically, when you go to load a map, it looks for them in a folder it's been told to look in from the options menu ( map-maker trunk/maps being the default ). When I try to change it to my working copy, it tells me it can't find it. I can, it's there on the desktop, in front of me. All I'm doing is giving the options screen directions by clicking the path to the folder, but for some reason it seems to get lost...

...Exactly the same thing happens when you're trying to give portals/exits their destination.

Is this your exit not working yesterday evening?

If so the problem is that you use incomplete absolute paths, this has nothing to do with darkness though. When you chose the destination make sure it has no / in front or it will be absolute. Click the [?] button next to the option in [Attributes] for a more specific explanation.
E.g. /killingwold/killingwold_0000 should be killingwold/killingwold_0000

--Mizza

[evilasa]

No, not actually in-game, on the map-maker. It's taking a lot longer to do stuff cos I have to type all the map connections in manually, and every time I want to load a map, I have to click back about 4 folders before I can even get into my working copy.

 And really it should be killingwold/killingwold-0000, but as I've said before, the bugs on the Killingwold mapset are to be temporarily ignored as it will be removed with some parts re-used around Epithetia. I'm tempted to break the exit...