DarkRadiant User Guide

DarkRadiant provides six buttons to quickly flip or rotate objects (in 90 degree increments) around each of the three world axes. These are available on the left-hand vertical toolbar.

For more precise control over object motion, there are three manipulator modes which can be selected with buttons on the left-hand vertical toolbar.

To create a simple rectangular brush, ensure that nothing is selected (ESC), then Left drag in the 2D view. A new brush will be created and sized according to the dragged area, with its dimensions snapped to the current grid level. To adjust the third dimension of the brush (perpendicular to the view direction), used Ctrl + TAB to switch the 2D view axis, and Left drag outside the brush boundary to adjust the size.

Although each brush starts out as a six-sided cuboid, it doesn’t have to stay that way. DarkRadiant offers several options for creating multi-sided brushes in more complex shapes. To create one of these shapes, first define a regular cuboid brush covering the volume you want the new shape to occupy, then choose the appropriate option from the Brush menu:

While these shapes can be useful for certain architectural modelling, remember that brushes are always flat-shaded and are not generally a good substitute for spheres or cones created with patches or static meshes.

Although it is not too difficult to create a hollow room by creating floor, ceiling and wall brushes manually, this is a common enough operation that DarkRadiant provides a couple of shortcuts. These options can be found on the vertical toolbar at the far left of the main window.

The room creation tools do not require the initial brush to be rectangular — you can quite happily Create Room with a triangular or trapezoidal brush, or a brush with sloping sides. However, with a more complex brush shape, the complexity of the resulting wall geometry increases considerably, so attempting to hollow out a 7-sided sphere is probably ill-advised.

Sometimes it is necessary to divide a brush into two or more pieces, perhaps to create a doorway or other opening. The Clipper tool, accessed with the X key, is used for this purpose.

All brush edges can be moved independently, which gives you the ability to quickly create shapes like triangles or trapeziums. This functionality is accessed via the Select Edges tool on the upper toolbar, or with the E key.

As well as using brushes to define map geometry, you can also use them to select objects. There are three commands on the top toolbar which convert the selected brush(es) into a temporary selection volume:

A simple patch starts off as a flat rectangle, which can then be manipulated with vertex editing to produce a curved surface, if desired.

To create a simple patch:

With a patch selected, press V to enter (or leave) vertex editing mode. This will display all of the control vertices, and allow you to select and move them.

Just like with brushes, DarkRadiant offers several default patch shapes beyond the flat simple patch. These can be created by choosing the corresponding option in the Patch menu. There is no need to have a brush selected first in order to create these shapes, however if a brush is selected, it will be removed and used to define the size of the patch shape.

Although patches are defined by Bezier curves, they are subdivided into flat polygons for rendering. By default, the number of polygons to create is determined dynamically by the game engine, based on the shape of the patch. However, you can also use the Patch Inspector to explicitly set the level of subdivision required, which can be useful when optimising a map by reducing on-screen polygon counts.

To subdivide a patch:

The Media tab shows a tree view which contains all of the textures available in the game installation. Selecting a texture in the tree will show a small preview swatch, along with some metadata about the texture definition.

To apply a texture to the selected brush, simply Double-click on a texture name in the tree. The tree view also offers a context menu with several options:

The Textures tab provides a scrollable canvas containing preview swatches of all the textures which are currently loaded in the current map.

When DarkRadiant first starts up no textures are loaded and this panel is empty. New textures can only be loaded via the Media tab (described in the previous section), either by applying a texture directly to a brush, or by using the Load in Textures view command to explicitly load an entire folder of textures.

Once textures are loaded onto the Textures tab, you can apply them to a selected object by Left clicking on them. By Right clicking on a texture you can access a context menu with a single command Seek in Media browser, which will highlight the clicked texture in the Media tab.

Once a texture is applied via the Media or Textures tabs, you will most likely wish to adjust the alignment and scale of the texture on the brush or patch face. DarkRadiant provides the Surface Inspector for this purpose, which can be toggled with the S key or by choosing the option in the View menu.

The Surface Inspector can be used to adjust textures on a single brush or patch face, or several selected faces/brushes/patches at once. If more than one face is selected and these faces have different values for text boxes in the dialog, the text box will be greyed out, however it is still possible to use the buttons to make changes which will be applied uniformly to all selected faces.

To create a light, Right click in the 2D view and choose Create light…. The position and size of the light volume depends on the current selection:

Unselected lights are shown in the 2D view as small boxes, while selected lights also show the boundaries of the light volume.

A selected light entity can be moved by dragging inside the small center box, and it can be resized by dragging outside the edge of the light volume. Unlike brushes, light volumes will by default resize symmetrically, so that the center point does not move during the resize.

There are a couple of options on the top toolbar which control the display and behaviour of light volumes:

Static models can be used to provide fine details in a map which would be difficult or impossible to create in the editor with brushes or patches. Models are created with an external 3D application such as Blender, Lightwave or Maya, and saved into the game asset tree in LWO or ASE format.

To insert a model, ensure that nothing is selected, then Right click in the 2D view and choose Create model…. DarkRadiant will show the model selector dialog:

In the top-left of the model selector window is a tree of all available models in the game installation. Models may have different skins, which are variants of the same model with different textures applied. If a model has skins available, these will be listed as children of the model entry in the tree.

Choosing a model or one of its skins will show a preview render in the large widget on the right-hand side. Various metadata such as the polygon count and the applied textures are also shown in table at the lower left.

When you have chosen the desired model, click OK to insert it into the map. The model will be inserted at the position where you originally right-clicked to show the model chooser.

The game requires a special entity (info_player_start) to mark the position at which the player should enter the map. Without such an entity the map will be unplayable.

To create this entity, ensure that nothing is selected then Right click in the 2D view and choose Create player start here. DarkRadiant will create the player start entity at the clicked position.

Since it makes no sense to have more than one player start location, DarkRadiant will not enable the Create player start here menu option if there is already an info_player_start in the map. Instead, you may choose Move player start here to move the existing entity to the clicked position.

Entity types without a dedicated item in the right-click menu are created using the generic Create entity… option, which displays a dialog very similar to the model selector:

Just like the model selector, the entity selector displays a tree of all available entity types in the game installation, and a large preview widget which shows an approximate rendering of the entity, if appropriate. Purely functional entity types such as info_location or info_player_start do not have any visible appearance and their render preview will be blank.

Some entity types have a short textual description giving information about their usage; if present, this is displayed in the text box underneath the entity class tree.

After selecting the desired entity type in the tree, click the Add button to insert an instance of the entity into the map at the right-clicked location. If the selected entity type requires a brush selection and no brush is selected, a warning will be shown at this point.

Every entity has a list of key/value pairs known as properties or spawnargs. These properties are displayed on the Entity tab of the editing panel.

The entity panel lists all of the properties of the currently-selected entity, showing each property’s name, its current value, and an icon representing its type (boolean, vector, text etc) if known. Selecting a property will populate the two text boxes in the center of the widget with the property name and value, allowing the value to be edited. If the selected property is of a known type, the panel at the bottom will show a custom widget appropriate for editing the particular property, e.g. three separate numeric spinboxes for a vector property, a colour selector widget for a colour property, and so on.

The entity panel provides two options controlling its behaviour:

To convert one or more existing primitives into a func_static entity, simply select all of the primitives, right-click in the 2D window, and choose Convert to func_static.

After converting a primitive, a number of changes are noticeable:

As mentioned in the previous section, selecting any primitive which comprises part of a func_static will cause the entire entity and all of its child primitives to be selected together. This allows you to easily move the entire static object by simply dragging any one of its primitives.

However, it is still possible to perform operations on a single primitive, for example resizing a brush, by selecting it with the TAB key. Each press of TAB will cause DarkRadiant to select a different primitive contained within the entity, after which it will return to selecting the entire entity. With only a single primitive selected, all of the normal operations are possible on that primitive, for example deleting or resizing it.

The entity inspector widget makes it clear whether you have selected an entity or a primitive within that entity, using the text above the list of entity properties. If an entire entity is selected, the text will appear similar to Entity 1, whereas with a primitive selected it will read Entity 1, Primitive 1.

A map "leak" occurs when the play area is not fully enclosed with a complete shell of opaque brushes. If the map leaks, compilation will fail and the map will not be playable.

In order to minimise the likelihood of a map leak, ensure that your map has all of the following properties:

No matter how hard you try to avoid leaks, occasionally they will happen. In this case the pointfile functionality is helpful to identify the location of the leak.

After the map compilation has failed with a leak, return to DarkRadiant and choose Pointfile from the File menu. This will automatically load the point file associated with the current map, which contains a series of points identifying the path to the leak. This path will be rendered as a bright red line in both the 2D and 3D views:

In this example we can clearly see that the map has leaked because the far wall brush does not join up with the ceiling.

Either right-click in the 2D window and choose Insert prefab…​, or open the File menu and choose Import prefab…​. This will show the prefab browser.

Like the model selector, the prefab selector shows a tree of available prefabs on the left, and a preview window on the right giving an idea of what the prefab looks like. Using the radio buttons at the top of the window, you can choose whether to browse prefabs contained within the game installation, or within a custom directory of your choice.

The preview window functions much like the 3D view in the main application: right click to enter or leave camera mode, which enables the following motion commands:

When you have chosen the desired prefab, click OK to insert it into the map. Before inserting the prefab, you can use the Create Group out of Prefab parts checkbox to control whether the prefab is automatically grouped as a single object, or inserted as separate selectable objects.

To show or hide the Layers window, choose Layers from the Edit menu. The window lists all of the layers which exist in the current project, and allows you to perform various operations on them.

An object can be placed in any number of layers. To see which layers a selected object is in, look at the narrow coloured rectangle next to the layer name in the Layers window. The rectangle will turn from grey to pink for each layer that contains the selected object.

All newly-created objects will be placed in the Default layer. You can move or copy objects between layers using the options in the 2D view’s context menu.

The Filter menu is populated with a number of built-in filter rules which are expected to be useful to mappers. Each filter may be activated independently, and each activated filter will be shown with a tick alongside its name. Filters operate in a "subtractive" sense: if a filter is active, objects matched by that filter will be hidden; the remaining visible objects will be those which are not matched by any active filters.

The built-in filters include:

Aside from the list of filters, the Filter menu contains three other options:

In addition to the filters supplied with the mod distribution, DarkRadiant also allows you to add your own custom filters to the list by choosing the Edit Filters…​ menu option. This displays a dialog containing the list of all available filters, including built-in ones. Use the Add and Delete buttons to add or remove custom filters from the list, and the Edit button to enter a new dialog which allows you to edit the rules of the selected filter.

Built-in filters cannot be removed or edited, but you can choose the View button to open the filter editor in a read-only mode.

Each filter consists of a number of rules, which are applied in the order shown in the list box. Filters may contain only a single rule ("hide all speaker entities"), or multiple rules ("hide all entities, then show only speaker entities"). You can freely add, remove or reorder rules using the buttons to the right of the rules list.

Each rule has the following components:

The Camera page contains options relating to the movement and behaviour of the 3D camera.

The Orthoview page contains options controlling the display and behaviour of the 2D views.

The Multi Monitor page contains a single setting, Start DarkRadiant on monitor, which allows you to choose which monitor DarkRadiant will start on if you have several available.

This page contains a couple of options relating to the appearance and default behaviour of the grid.

This page contains two options controlling the default behaviour of applied textures. These values can be set on a per-object basis using the Surface Inspector.

These options control the behaviour of the Textures tab.

To change the visibility of assets, you need to create a file called assets.lst which resides in the top-level models or materials directories in the mod installation. This file may be inside a PK4 or in an extracted directory tree.

The contents of assets.lst are a simple list of key/value pairs, assigning a visibility value to each named asset. For example:

Asset paths listed on the left-hand side are interpreted relative to the directory containing assets.lst (which must be models or materials). The visibility value on the right-hand side must be either hidden or normal; a value of normal is equivalent to not listing the file at all, and results in no change to its visibility.