Adding doors to adjoining rooms

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sharez66
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Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2018 3:48 am

Adding doors to adjoining rooms

Post by sharez66 » Sat Nov 14, 2020 5:08 am

Using Dungeon mode, when I place 2 rooms next to each other, inserting a door to connect them is a problem. I place the door, but only one side of the wall is removed making it look very odd. Is there a solution to this. Apologies if this has already been covered.

nDervish
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Re: Adding doors to adjoining rooms

Post by nDervish » Sat Nov 14, 2020 7:06 am

I ran into this problem a couple days ago. After fiddling with different things, I finally came to the conclusion that drawing two separate Closed Areas ("rooms") and placing them side-by-side or overlapping their walls is almost certainly not the intended way to do this. Instead, what you "should" do is draw a single, larger Closed Area for the shared outer wall of the two rooms together, and then use the Wall tool to place an interior wall dividing the one Closed Area into two rooms. Then the door Just Works(tm), since there's only one wall there instead of two walls (one from each room).

Minor feature request for the devs, though: For the sake of those of us who find it more natural to draw individual rooms as separate Closed Areas and then place them side-by-side, it would be nice to have a way to merge overlapping walls into a single wall. (Merge Paths doesn't achieve this - although it initially looks like it does, you can't put doors/openings in the interior wall.)

sharez66
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Re: Adding doors to adjoining rooms

Post by sharez66 » Sat Nov 14, 2020 10:45 am

I take your point about using walls to turn one big room into 2 smaller ones to enable the doors to look right. Unfortunately it is also a problem when using corridors. Maybe the best way around this is to set the door thickness the same as the wall. You keep the shadow in place, but that makes sense as a door would still create a shadow the same as a door. Only gaps in the wall would be a problem with this. Realistically though would a room open out into a corridor with a gap (ie no door). Unlikely so I can live with it. Might be an idea to fix this problem in a future update though.

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Kanchou
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Re: Adding doors to adjoining rooms

Post by Kanchou » Sat Nov 14, 2020 9:48 pm

Thank you both for the feedback! What nDervish said is the way the tools are intended to be used (we need to make a video on this). Future versions will have "snap" to outer walls (like rivers do to edge of a landmass) to make this easier.

We have plans for smart interactions between closed areas but that's for later next year.

On the request to improve the merge, that's a good point. We need to make a change to the engine so it can handle that better. Right now it struggles with complete overlaps.

On the corridors. We originally intended that for fast drawing of the corridor style dungeons, but it really ended up being more confusing than anything. In retrospect, we probably should have just had a single tool and "corridor" be a mode of the close area that still just added the perimeter path to the final shape and not the way it works now.

Thank you!

- Alejandro
Alejandro S. Canosa
Three Minds Software

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Kanchou
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Re: Adding doors to adjoining rooms

Post by Kanchou » Sat Nov 14, 2020 9:56 pm

(Katie's video on the light sources may help a little)
https://youtu.be/RkfUmpCo1MA?t=99
Alejandro S. Canosa
Three Minds Software

nDervish
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Re: Adding doors to adjoining rooms

Post by nDervish » Sun Nov 15, 2020 7:13 am

sharez66 wrote:
Sat Nov 14, 2020 10:45 am
Realistically though would a room open out into a corridor with a gap (ie no door). Unlikely so I can live with it.
Depends on your setting. In a classic-style dungeon, it doesn't seem to be that common, but I see it constantly in the real world. Homes and apartments have a hallway leading to the bedrooms/bathrooms... and the hallway connects to a living room on one end with no door. Malls are basically a big hallway with shops on either side, all connected with no doors. Office buildings have hallways sprouting from lobbies with no door separating them. Factories might have a door between the shop floor and a hallway, but they often don't, depending mainly on how "clean" (isolated from dust, grease, etc.) the area attached to the hallway is meant to be compared to the shop floor.

sharez66
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Re: Adding doors to adjoining rooms

Post by sharez66 » Sun Nov 15, 2020 7:59 am

Depends on your setting. In a classic-style dungeon, it doesn't seem to be that common, but I see it constantly in the real world. Homes and apartments have a hallway leading to the bedrooms/bathrooms... and the hallway connects to a living room on one end with no door. Malls are basically a big hallway with shops on either side, all connected with no doors. Office buildings have hallways sprouting from lobbies with no door separating them. Factories might have a door between the shop floor and a hallway, but they often don't, depending mainly on how "clean" (isolated from dust, grease, etc.) the area attached to the hallway is meant to be compared to the shop floor.
My mind was on "Classic" dungeons as you say. Hoping they can solve this problem soon, as I do feel that OWM is just a few steps a way from greatness as a mapping tool.

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Kanchou
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Re: Adding doors to adjoining rooms

Post by Kanchou » Mon Nov 16, 2020 6:14 pm

Re-reading your comment, can you clarify this part?
nDervish wrote:
Sat Nov 14, 2020 7:06 am

Minor feature request for the devs, though: For the sake of those of us who find it more natural to draw individual rooms as separate Closed Areas and then place them side-by-side, it would be nice to have a way to merge overlapping walls into a single wall. (Merge Paths doesn't achieve this - although it initially looks like it does, you can't put doors/openings in the interior wall.)
Thank you!
Alejandro S. Canosa
Three Minds Software

nDervish
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Re: Adding doors to adjoining rooms

Post by nDervish » Tue Nov 17, 2020 6:18 am

Kanchou wrote:
Mon Nov 16, 2020 6:14 pm
Re-reading your comment, can you clarify this part?
I'm not sure which part you want clarification on, so I'll try to hit the major points. If I miss the part that was unclear to you, just let me know (clarify? :D ) what else you want me to follow up on.

"For the sake of those of us who find it more natural to draw individual rooms as separate Closed Areas and then place them side-by-side,"

On the specific map where I ran into this, I had started by determining what rooms would be present in a particular building, then drew scattered Closed Areas for each room and dragged the individual rooms around as I was deciding what the most reasonable arrangement for them would be (which ones connected to each other, etc.), then finally tweaked the sizes of individual rooms to make them match up with their neighbors. I had no idea of the overall size or shape of the building's outer wall when I started.

So pretty much the exact opposite of the intended "draw the outer wall first, then subdivide it into rooms" workflow.

"it would be nice to have a way to merge overlapping walls into a single wall. (Merge Paths doesn't achieve this - although it initially looks like it does, you can't put doors/openings in the interior wall.)"

Before giving up and redrawing the building from scratch as a single, subdivided Closed Area, one of the things I tried was lining up two adjacent rooms so that their adjoining walls were perfectly (or as close as I could get it) on top of each other, then using Merge Paths to combine them and turn the two overlapped walls into a single wall. This effectively seems to have worked for a solid, continuous wall between the two rooms (it initially looked as I expected), but the door between the two rooms disappeared when I merged them.

When I went to re-add the door, I found that the Opening tool showed an "X" cursor when I moved it over the merged/interior wall. If I placed the pointer over the exterior wall near the merged/interior wall, the opening would flow around the corner onto the interior wall, but I could not place the center of the opening on the interior wall. (I tried to provide screenshots to illustrate, but GIMP overrides OWM's mouse pointer with its own crosshair pointer when taking screenshots, so I wasn't able to capture the change in the Opening tool cursor.)

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Kyete
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Re: Adding doors to adjoining rooms

Post by Kyete » Mon Nov 23, 2020 1:32 pm

nDervish wrote:
Tue Nov 17, 2020 6:18 am
I'm not sure which part you want clarification on, so I'll try to hit the major points. If I miss the part that was unclear to you, just let me know (clarify? :D ) what else you want me to follow up on.

"For the sake of those of us who find it more natural to draw individual rooms as separate Closed Areas and then place them side-by-side,"

On the specific map where I ran into this, I had started by determining what rooms would be present in a particular building, then drew scattered Closed Areas for each room and dragged the individual rooms around as I was deciding what the most reasonable arrangement for them would be (which ones connected to each other, etc.), then finally tweaked the sizes of individual rooms to make them match up with their neighbors. I had no idea of the overall size or shape of the building's outer wall when I started.

So pretty much the exact opposite of the intended "draw the outer wall first, then subdivide it into rooms" workflow.

"it would be nice to have a way to merge overlapping walls into a single wall. (Merge Paths doesn't achieve this - although it initially looks like it does, you can't put doors/openings in the interior wall.)"

Before giving up and redrawing the building from scratch as a single, subdivided Closed Area, one of the things I tried was lining up two adjacent rooms so that their adjoining walls were perfectly (or as close as I could get it) on top of each other, then using Merge Paths to combine them and turn the two overlapped walls into a single wall. This effectively seems to have worked for a solid, continuous wall between the two rooms (it initially looked as I expected), but the door between the two rooms disappeared when I merged them.

When I went to re-add the door, I found that the Opening tool showed an "X" cursor when I moved it over the merged/interior wall. If I placed the pointer over the exterior wall near the merged/interior wall, the opening would flow around the corner onto the interior wall, but I could not place the center of the opening on the interior wall. (I tried to provide screenshots to illustrate, but GIMP overrides OWM's mouse pointer with its own crosshair pointer when taking screenshots, so I wasn't able to capture the change in the Opening tool cursor.)
I was able to recreate exactly what you described. Thank you for pointing it out! It's a bug and I've added it to our list of things to fix. Hopefully we'll be able to squeeze it into the next release, but if not it'll definitely be fixed in the one after that.

-Katie

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