Learning Radiant - Hours 2 to 4

"The possibility of a resonance cascade scenario is extremely  unlikely," they said; "it's probably not a problem," they said.

Hour 2

Well, I tried to follow the tutorial again.  Problems ahoy.

So I did some searching and discovered a Valve Developer page which says:

"Note:  GtkRadiant 1.5 has certain compatibility and stability issues when creating maps for Half-Life, for this reason 1.4 or earlier are recommended instead."

So with that helpful piece of advice, I uninstalled 1.5 and installed 1.4, went to create a new Half-Life file, and...

Half-Life was not an option to choose from.  Counter Strike was, so I took it.  It appears so far that, to the program, Counter Strike and Half-Life are interchangeable synonyms.

Long story short, caulking still won't work.  Perhaps caulking is something that Half-Life simply can't handle, so I'm ignoring it until necessary.

So I tried the other steps again:  hollow cube, texture, player start, light, compile, and... it worked!

However, I started getting save errors.  Radiant tried to append "No brushes selected" to the end of the file name (even if I do have a brush selected as I save).  This is the weirdest freakin' error I've ever seen.

Somehow I fixed it, through a combination of saving, compiling and loading, but I'm still not sure exactly what the fix was.

The only error I seem to have left is figuring out how to make Half-Life find the file and play it.

Hour 3

In an attempt to get the level working, I backtracked and hosed myself.  Even though I solved that filename save error once, it came back.

Finally I found the solution with enough searching, which was to simply uncheck a particular box, and now saving works fine.  Still, the level doesn't seem to load in Half-Life, but at least I completely solved one problem.

Although, on occasion, the box rechecks itself.

The error I seem to be getting about loading Half-Life is that I'm seeing the Eye of God.

As the loading screen slides up, the screen looks like what's on the bottom there.

I can still hear the jump sound so I know the player is landing on solid ground; it's simply the visual that isn't working, even though I have a light and an enclosed space.

I had the thought that it might be a texture issue, so next I added an HEV suit into the level, since it's a model.  This is what I got:

I also noticed that when I load the test level, I get the warning "could not find [wall texture] in any listed wad files, searching all wad files instead!"

So my guess is that even though the editor finds the texture properly, it is not directly connected to the map when I compile.

So next I tried turning the room into a prefab, thinking that perhaps the texture would be (and I don't know the technical term) "fused" to the model.  However, the program crashed when I tried to make a prefab, so I'd say that's out for the time being.

Hour 4

I tried looking up the warning I got (minus the exact texture name) and I got exactly 1 result, in German, and the solution was never found.

I tried just opening a Half-Life level to see what they do differently.  Unfortunately, because the editor uses .map files for editing and compiles them into .bsp's, I can't load a Half-Life map into the editor.

My next thought was that perhaps the editor has a problem with the whole Half-Life/Counterstrike naming thing, and I had best reinstall the editor and point to Counterstrike instead of the original Half-Life.

No luck.  Same problem.

Until I can get this fixed, learning Radiant will slow down to a crawl.

If you have any suggestions for fixes, leave a comment and I'll try it out.

Learning Radiant - Hour 1

I remember when I first downloaded and tried to use Radiant.  In the manual there was a quick tutorial on making a simple room, starting with a hollow cube.  I remember that I could make the cube just fine, but when I clicked the 'Hollow' button, the cube got deleted.  This annoyed me greatly, and I set the editor aside, to be learned when I had more patience.

Well, starting it up again (to learn it in earnest this month) led to the same problem.  I tried hollowing out a cube many times, but it never seemed to work.

The manual's tutorial simply doesn't work for me, and I can't yet find the problem.

So instead I found a decent resource on how to use Radiant, and I tried making the room based on what it showed.

I made six separate thin cubes that would serve as the sides of a hollow cube.  I grabbed a random texture from Half-Life (the only game I have that Radiant works for) and applied it to the cubes.

This worked without problems, so I added a light and a player start, and compiled.

My BSP disappeared.

In fact, my light disappeared too.  The compiler detected no errors at all, so I don't know why almost everything went boom.

That green thing is a player start.  The gray is where my light and walls should be.

I can only imagine there is a problem with the way I set up Radiant, like the directory structure is off or it points to certain folders or game files incorrectly.

So next, even though my BSP seemingly went away, I decided to test it anyway.  The online resource seems to indicate that there is no way to test in-editor, so I went into Half-Life and tried to load up my test map.

It can't find it.  Half-Life can't find anything but Team Fortress and Opposing Force.

So I seem to have at least three problems I have to figure out before I can move on: compile disappearance, hollowing disappearances, and Half-Life finding the file.

This is going to be a fun month.