DescentBB

Hello,

So I've searched for this, and I can't seem to find anything. What does it mean when you move the mouse while holding shift in DLE? It seems to outline the segments in colored dashed lines that are blue, white, yellow and red. There are also blue and yellow circles that appear. These lines/circles move from segment to segment with the mouse. I however cannot yet get it to do anything useful. What is this for, and is there something useful I can do with it? I am interested in what it can do.

Thanks

It's just a "select" mode. The idea is you can select any side of any segment even if it's obscured, has no wall, or something like that. I don't use it heavily but sometimes that's a bit quicker than just clicking on something nearby and navigating to the side you really wanted with the arrow keys.

Thanks Sirius - I just tried it and see what you mean. Speaking in selecting faces, I've been wondering if there is a way to quickly unstretch the textures on cube faces when they're all stretched. Is there a shortcut key or a way to unstretch all 6 of them in a particular cube? Its the left-most red button above 'align all sides' checkbox in the texture tab. Its not a dire need, but it seems to take a lot of time to select each face and click that button every time I move something.

Quickest way is probably C (cube mode) -> M (mark current selection, in this case the whole cube) -> "reset marked sides" button on the texture alignment panel.

If you tend to build levels in "passes" - i.e. you do all the geometry before the texturing - then you can just reset the whole mine with Alt+M -> reset marked sides. If you don't, that'll mess up the work you've already done though.

P.S. The reset marked sides button is the second one from the left on that row. It's supposed to have a tool-tip to tell you that, but it looks like the texture panel reshuffle broke the tool-tips because the container class the alignment tools got moved under doesn't implement tool-tip handling. Trying to fix that, not sure when it'll be out yet.

It's the only blue button IIRC.

This is very useful, thanks. I've been using it. It saves a bunch of time and clicking. I know there are more conveniences I don't know about just because i've never really investigated. So I might as well ask what the other modes are for, like set-block, which is right-most on the top bar (not the buttons, but the top ribbon). There are also set-point and set-line modes which I never use. What would one use these for?

Hmm... OK, those are the selection "mode" controls I think. They control what is manipulated by the geometry edit commands.
The default is side mode; in this case it will move the currently selected side.
Point mode moves the selected point. Line mode moves the selected line. Cube mode moves the whole cube (attached cubes will be stretched as it moves). Block mode moves all marked cubes, sides and vertices.
There is also an object mode which can be used for repositioning objects.

Regarding marking: you can do this by pressing "M" to toggle whether the current selection is marked. (Whether this is the selected point, line, side or cube depends on... you guessed it, the selection mode.) You can also mark things by click+drag, kind of like bulk-selecting stuff on your desktop. There's also a "quick select" command, which I don't use very much but I think it's Ctrl+click to mark, ctrl+right click to unmark. I can look it up later if you need it.

I would find a quick select quite useful.

I investigated further and there are three problems with that feature currently.
1) It's only available in first-person mode (due to it being somewhat of a "make DLE work like Devil" mode rather than merely a perspective switch).
2) Due to a design problem with the input handler (this one is my fault), it's a little tricky to get it to register - has to be LMB down, Shift down, LMB up - in that order. Not very natural.
3) There is, in fact, no quick unmark counterpart.

The closest thing to that operation that works reliably is left click to select then M to mark. The main difference is that M is a toggle, so it can unmark stuff too.