TDBots Mk2 - v1 (11/05/2022)

[baj468]

Hi, just a quick post to tell you the tool I'm making to insert waypoints into .WAD files is coming along nicely, It can load / save and insert waypoints, I've added a screen shot of how it looks so far.

Current Features:
Load and save .wad with waypoints stored in LANGUAGE lump,
Load and save in DOOM, HEXEN and UDMF formats,
Place new waypoints,
Scroll / zoom map view


Things left to do:

Select waypoints,
Move Waypoints,
Grid snapping,
Adjust Heights of Waypoints,
Draw icons for "Things" on the map,
Draw "Special" linedefs in color,
Launch (G)ZDoom from Waymaker App.

Cheers

[TDRR]

Hi, just a quick post to tell you the tool I'm making to insert waypoints into .WAD files is coming along nicely, It can load / save and insert waypoints, I've added a screen shot of how it looks so far.

Current Features:
Load and save .wad with waypoints stored in LANGUAGE lump,
Load and save in DOOM, HEXEN and UDMF formats,
Place new waypoints,
Scroll / zoom map view


Things left to do:

Select waypoints,
Move Waypoints,
Grid snapping,
Adjust Heights of Waypoints,
Draw icons for "Things" on the map,
Draw "Special" linedefs in color,
Launch (G)ZDoom from Waymaker App.

Cheers

This is really awesome, glad to see it's already in a working state, looks nice too!

The only thing I would request that's not on the to-do list, is having a way to see the height of a 3D floor on a selected/highlighted sector. Not 100% necessary and it would still be extremely useful if it didn't have that feature, but if you figure out a way to pull it off, that would be great.

Again, this is amazing, keep up the great job!

[baj468]

Hi, glad you like the look, It's at this stage so quick because I'm using my 2 .WAD file classes I wrote for my other project which is a DETH / DEU style UDMF map creator / editor for Windows called "RaiseHell", I just had to add LANGUAGE lump handling with parsing of waypoint string for input and output.

Your Idea of showing 3D Floor heights is definately reachable maybe with tooltips or status line, or label, I'll have a think. My editor shows sector heights already and handles 3D Floors and the WAD classes come from there so it's mainly a question of best way to present the info to the user. Maybe I'll add it to RaiseHell too

Regarding the waypoints and 3D Floors I have a question about them... If a waypoint is to be for the bot to run over a 3D Floor, should it be the height of the 3D Floor's floor height?

I'm currently working on the waypoint selection which is going well so far


Anyway, I'll leave this post here but just wanted to say I'm happy to help out as I enjoy playing with Doom Bots, and this is a really cool bot for my favorite sourceport.

Cheers mate.

[TDRR]

Hi, glad you like the look, It's at this stage so quick because I'm using my 2 .WAD file classes I wrote for my other project which is a DETH / DEU style UDMF map creator / editor for Windows called "RaiseHell", I just had to add LANGUAGE lump handling with parsing of waypoint string for input and output.

Your Idea of showing 3D Floor heights is definately reachable maybe with tooltips or status line, or label, I'll have a think. My editor shows sector heights already and handles 3D Floors and the WAD classes come from there so it's mainly a question of best way to present the info to the user. Maybe I'll add it to RaiseHell too

Sounds like a good idea, I think maybe showing it in the status line if it's not too filled up with info already would work well. But whatever you think would work best is fine by me.

About it being DETH/DEU style, you nailed the look, it really does resemble those editors from back then and that's pretty cool.

Regarding the waypoints and 3D Floors I have a question about them... If a waypoint is to be for the bot to run over a 3D Floor, should it be the height of the 3D Floor's floor height?

Yes, exactly that's how it works.

By the way, if you need to see the waypoints in-game (without using IDDT+automap), you can open the TDBotsV26c pk3 file, and in tdbots/pathnoding.dec, comment out the +INVISIBLE flag for the TDBots_PathNode and TDBots_NodeRespawn actors.
That will make them display like in the Node Studio (purple for normal node, red for precision and green for jump), plus a gray color every time they're inactive (a state that lasts 5 seconds after being touched by a bot). Might make testing a bit easier.

I'm currently working on the waypoint selection which is going well so far


Anyway, I'll leave this post here but just wanted to say I'm happy to help out as I enjoy playing with Doom Bots, and this is a really cool bot for my favorite sourceport.

Cheers mate.

That's great, sounds like this will be done quite a bit quicker than I initially expected, which is just awesome.
Really, thanks so much for your effort, this is great.

[baj468]

Hi again, yeah DEU was my favorite editor for years, I liked the work flow of it that's why I'm going for that look. It shouldn't be too long before I have Waymaker fully useable but I have one last question about the nodes;

When you mention "jump" and "precision" nodes, how are they different to regular nodes? do they have a different format when saved and loaded
ATM I have a single node save and load as xxx;yyy;zzz in the string, do jump and precision nodes save with extra or different info?

I hope it's not a dumb question, I'm just trying to make it fully compatible

Cheers mate.

[TDRR]

When you mention "jump" and "precision" nodes, how are they different to regular nodes? do they have a different format when saved and loaded
ATM I have a single node save and load as xxx;yyy;zzz in the string, do jump and precision nodes save with extra or different info?

I completely forgot about this detail. You see, normally the waypoint data is stored as "version 0", which only has the normal nodes.

However, if the entry name has "New" appended at the end of the name (for example, MAP01NodesNew), it's recognized as version 1, and there's a 4th value for every node, which is the type. 0 is normal, 1 is jump, and 2 is precision.

So, if the entry name has "New" appended at the end of the name, you should expect that 4th parameter so the format is x;y;z;t.

I hope it's not a dumb question, I'm just trying to make it fully compatible

Not a dumb question, in fact it's dumber that I didn't mention it at first!

[baj468]

Awesome thanks so much for the clarification, I will adapt that into Waymaker next edit. That will be easy as to code for Thanks

Cheers, mate

[baj468]

Hi mate,

Just a quick post to let you know Waymaker is still coming along good

Now it can:
1. Save And load all 3 types of waypoint directly into the wadfile in the LANGUAGE Lump.
2. Save and Load to DooM, Hexen and UDMF format wads.
3. Export as language lump or as nodes string.
4. Sector Highlighting.
5. Add and delete waypoints.
6. Grid Snapping.
7. Move waypoints around with mouse drag and menu options.
8. Show waypoints outside map boundaries as grayed-out.
9. Presents 3 different colored flags based on node type, Purple for normal, Green for jump and Red for precision,.
10. Change heights of waypoints using 3 different options
10a: Place on sector floor.
10b: Detects 3D-Floors heights in sector and presents a list of which height to set to, I'll probably make it not show the list and set it automatically if only 1 3D-Floor is detected.
10c: Manual set height value.



Next To Do:
1. Configuration System.
2. Launch (G)ZDoom with map and bots loaded.
3. Show 3D-Floor heights, Probably with Tooltips
4. Undo Support.
5. Online Help File.

Cheers

ps, Will I be able to post the file here for users to get later? Is posting of apps allowed? I'm new to these kind of forums.

[TDRR]

Hi mate,

Just a quick post to let you know Waymaker is still coming along good

Now it can:
1. Save And load all 3 types of waypoint directly into the wadfile in the LANGUAGE Lump.
2. Save and Load to DooM, Hexen and UDMF format wads.
3. Export as language lump or as nodes string.
4. Sector Highlighting.
5. Add and delete waypoints.
6. Grid Snapping.
7. Move waypoints around with mouse drag and menu options.
8. Show waypoints outside map boundaries as grayed-out.
9. Presents 3 different colored flags based on node type, Purple for normal, Green for jump and Red for precision,.
10. Change heights of waypoints using 3 different options
10a: Place on sector floor.
10b: Detects 3D-Floors heights in sector and presents a list of which height to set to, I'll probably make it not show the list and set it automatically if only 1 3D-Floor is detected.
10c: Manual set height value.

Wow, that's extremely cool. Really nice you got all these features in so quickly!

Next To Do:
1. Configuration System.
2. Launch (G)ZDoom with map and bots loaded.
3. Show 3D-Floor heights, Probably with Tooltips
4. Undo Support.
5. Online Help File.

That sounds really good, but what is the config system for? Keybinds, I suppose?

ps, Will I be able to post the file here for users to get later? Is posting of apps allowed? I'm new to these kind of forums.

You can post it, yeah, but I recommend uploading it to somewhere like Mediafire, because uploading it here limits you to a 256kb zip file.

[baj468]

Yeah, I'm happy with how fast things are coming along, We're in lockdown due to coronavirus here so I have extra free time also some of the systems I'm using are based on RaiseHell (my other project) so I already have the components. My plan is to integrate the waypoint system into RaisHell as well, so I'm making Waymaker's waypoints interface compatible with it too.

The config system is just the ability to read and write a .cfg file so the user can specify the GZDoom.exe file location and the TDBot.pk3 file location for direct launch of the game it also specifies some other things like how many undo steps to record and a couple of view settings, just that sorta thing

As of this post, Launch GZDoom feature is done anyway LOL.
I'll be starting on undo very soon and it will be based on RaiseHell's.

The slowest bit will probably be the help file but I always make one with my projects.

Thanks for the tip on uploading, cheers

[baj468]

Hi, just a quick update,

There will be a link to get the Waymaker app posted soon after the help file is done. I'm about to start that now.
I'm going to make a Mediafire account to host it.

The undo is done now and the tooltips for showing 3D-Floor heights are done now too.


Cheers

[baj468]

Hi, Here it is I've included a link to the Waymaker Version 1.0 application on my MediaFire account, feel free to post it on any doom related site.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/7aad8tqee ... r.zip/file


In the package along with Waymaker is a readme file and online help Waymaker.chm as well as the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable package required.

Cheers

[doomfan]

Thanks for making Waymaker, it looks really promising.

I've been using TDBotsV26cZan.pk3 (w/ Zand.) for deathmatch and on some maps the bot doesn't handle height changes well (e.g. D5M1 GA ledge, Phyrric13 courtyard stairs to SSG+GA).

1. Will putting down some waypoints help with this kind of navigation problem?
2. Does sprinkling a few waypoints around difficult spots help or does the whole map need to be properly waypointed?

[TDRR]

Hi, Here it is I've included a link to the Waymaker Version 1.0 application on my MediaFire account, feel free to post it on any doom related site.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/7aad8tqee ... r.zip/file


In the package along with Waymaker is a readme file and online help Waymaker.chm as well as the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable package required.

Cheers

This is really cool. Thank you so much for this! Took a quick peek and I like how the program looks and the options to change the style.

However, a couple bug reports, on my end the waypoints aren't rendering (so I can only see the sectors but no waypoints after inserting some), and it doesn't seem to work after specifying my Doom 2 IWAD either. And the .chm file doesn't display here (this one is probably a quirk with my PC, certain other chms don't load either but some function normally), but other than that everything seems to be working. I assume the display bugs may have something to do with my GPU or me running Windows 7?

[baj468]

Hi, I'll try to help the best I can,

However, a couple bug reports, on my end the waypoints aren't rendering (so I can only see the sectors but no waypoints after inserting some)

I use Windows 10 here but I don't think Windows 7 should be a problem, The waypoints are little flags, when touched by the mouse they'll have a box appear around them, does the box appear?

and it doesn't seem to work after specifying my Doom 2 IWAD either.

What symptoms are you getting here, in what way is it not working after specifying the IWad? Do you know the version of your IWad, mine is the original version.
The IWad is only required if you want to launch (G)ZDoom directly through Waymayer, it's not needed for waypoint placing.

And the .chm file doesn't display here (this one is probably a quirk with my PC, certain other chms don't load either but some function normally)

I'll make a quick guide in text form to help when there are .CHM issues.


Also, here's some quick tips until then:
------------------------------------------------
Use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out.
Press 'G' to make the grid tighter, Shift+G to make the grid wider.

A map must be loaded in before waypoints can be placed.

If your mouse has the two media buttons on the side (referred to as X-Buttons by Waymaker):
Set mouse mode in Waymaker setup to use X-buttons, in this example I'll use the 3rd choice [M-Button Scroll, Any-X Move] it's the one I use.
This means, use the middle mouse button as page scroll (hold button down and move to move viewport around)
and, use any X-Button to move Waypoints around, select them then hold down an X-Button, move mouse to move waypoint.
note: it'll move in units of grid size.

If your mouse does not have X-Buttons set mouse mode to the last choice [Non X-Button Mouse]
then use the arrow keys to move the viewport around and middle button to move waypoints.

Waypoints appear as little flags.

Select waypoints by touching them with the mouse and pressing the left mouse button.
Clear selection with the 'C' key or re-click selected waypoints to unselect them.

Insert a waypoint by pressing the "Insert" key or by using the popup menu.
Delete waypoints, by selecting and pressing "Delete".

I hope the quick guide helps Cheers