Posted by Le Chief on Tue Jan 19th 2010 at 11:59am

I get what you're saying for the z-axis section. You're talking about height variation in terms of gameplay not aesthetics.

Posted by Riven on Sun Jan 3rd 2010 at 7:59am



Heh, re-reading it with an outsider's perspective now, I can see the confusion. I seem to start off strong and then quickly disintegrate without even properly wrapping-up that particular section. I'll edit it to be sure and make it a bit more clear and perhaps add some more info. -Thanks for pointing that out!



Duly noted haymaker. I feel there should be some clarification also on some of the spawn flags that are common for both phys_ entities. Just because it's phys_mp doesn't mean the player can't pick it up; there are other settings to be checked for THAT to happen. However, what you stated about turning them into static props in fact can't be done for most of those keyboard, bucket, etc... models unless you could recompile them with their QC files. So, if say you turned off their collision with the player, and turned off their ability to be picked up, the only calculation the server would be performing on them would be anytime they hit another prop_phys(_mp). Otherwise, the server turns off their collision hull until they actually do come in contact with something that is allowed to hit them (via the flags). You can see this very clearly if "mat_fullbright 1" is turned on in a map. But yes, you are right for pointing that out, and I'll be sure to edit that info into the article. Thanks for pointing that out!

The fade property may be out of the scope for this article, but I could mention it nonetheless.

About the respawnable props: I honestly don't have much knowledge on the effects of _respawnable props, but it is probably worth mentioning; I'll do some more homework

Thanks again for the feedback guys.

Posted by larchy on Sat Jan 2nd 2010 at 12:35pm

I've added a preview system to the new article page. It's a bit different to the forum system because the parsing for articles is pretty complicated... there are a few issues and I've spent about 4 hours coding something that hopefully works ok.

It won't show images (because they don't get uploaded until the form is submitted, and there's no AJAX system in place for this bit), but will show placeholders for image tags.

Pagination is also... problematic.... so everything gets shown on one page. You can still see the article index and where each page starts/ends ok though.


I could get round the problems by temporarily shunting everything into the db, but that's not really ideal and brings it's own issues.

Anyway have a look and see if what's there is ok.

If your button is green, refresh your stylesheet.

Posted by larchy on Fri Jan 1st 2010 at 6:08pm

There are some issues with the way articles work that means adding previews was quite troublesome if I did it the same way as forum posts.... however I think I've thought of quite a good way around it that I'll try and add over the weekend.

Posted by Riven on Fri Jan 1st 2010 at 4:43pm

This tutorial was done completely On-Site. I've thought about re-creating other tutorials from other sites and adding them to the SnarkPit, but I would want to do it under the account The SnarkPit because it's not an original tutorial. And I don't have access to that account anyway. But before bothering with that, sometimes I think about all the clean-up that needs to be done with the articles and downloads we already have. A lot of them are missing images, the HTML for other articles clutters everything up, and the games for the maps section still need banner images and descriptions (check the L4D2 banner and look for the info button to see what they could all have). It's a great feature larchy implemented, that I'd like to get around to filling-in.

Beyond that, It was not too difficult to write the tutorial on-site; It's like any other post with BBcode enabled. Although without the admin abilities, I couldn't find a way to preview my article before submitting it, I might had just missed it. But the way it works is, when you're done typing your new article, and you click 'submit,' It gets sent to the admin approval page where an admin has the opportunity to check the article's thoroughness and content and basically preview it before it get's posted on the main site for everyone to see. If it's approved, it goes on with any changes the admin might had made; if it get's denied, a few notes could be written about it, but then it is sent back to the author for revisions and re-submittal. Now, remember, there is no way for the author to preview his work before it get's submitted to the main site, and even when it does get approved, there is no way to edit it (as the author) after it's been posted. The admin check/revision period can go on for as long as the admin deems necessary.

So, It's a nice system that works, but I'll propose a few suggestions in the feedback thread having now had first-hand experience with it.

If it weren't for my admin abilities, it would have take a bit longer to get this posted in the condition that it is.