Like all greats things everything starts from setting up your environment for building maps and using the IonRadiant editor. IonRadiant is a circa 1998 fork of QERadiant editor which some of you probably are already familiar with. Or maybe you're familiar with it's older or newer iterations such as QuakeEd, QE4, GtkRadiant/ZeroRadiant, DarkRadiant, etc. There's a reason why there are several different Radiant editors but that's a story for another time.

IonRadiant isn't exactly same thing as QERadiant and has Daikatana specific additional capabilities. It isn't as high-tech editor as UnrealEd or even the later editors in Radiant-family. It's an editor with a lots of historical baggage with it so some of the work processes in it absolutely do not make sense now but did made at lot of sense in late 90s. This will be an exercise in patience.

Most of the information I'm about to go through was collected from various readme.txt files[dk.toastednet.org] and just playing around with the editor and asking from people "who know their stuff (tm)". I'm trying to get you guys quickly started with building maps but first we need to go through the configuration process and setting the editor up specifically for Daikatana.

Lets get this thing rolling... By the way ensure that you'll have up to date graphics drivers and the possible OpenGL1.2 compatibility flags are enabled. If things don't work with the IonRadiant and it crashes or something weird happens don't panic. Usually there's a way to fix these issues.

• Download Daikatana tools package for example from Fileplanet[www.fileplanet.com] or from DK 1.3 repository[bitbucket.org]. Make a folder e.g. "C:\dk_tools\" and unpack everything there.
  
• Download Daikatana utilities DaiMDL, DaiPAK and DaiWAL from http://www.daikatananews.net/downloads/daitools.zip. Especially important is DaiPAK. Unpack these tools to "C:\dk_tools". If you have conflict with e.g. readme.txt then rename that file to readme2.txt or something.
  
• Create a folder e.g. "C:\dk_map\" for maps. It should be located outside actual Daikatana folder, name contains no spaces and name consists of 8 characters or less.
  
• Make a copy of fully updated Daikatana 1.3 folder and move&rename it to e.g. "C:\dk_dev\".

Use the DaikPak to unpack folder "textures", "sounds" and "models" from Daikatana's PAK1.pak file to Daikatana's \data folder so that you'll have directory tree like data\textures, data\sounds and data\models. In this guide \data is located in "C:\dk_dev\data\" directory). We're mostly interested on the textures. You could technically just unpack everything but I'd recommend for the goals of this tutorial to just unpack those three folders so that:

A. IonRadiant will be able to show you the textures in the editor.
B. You'll be able to use your favourite sound player to figure out what ambient sounds you want to have in a map.
C. You can use DaiMDL to browse and inspect 3D props you want to have in your map.

Unpacking everything would make DK also slightly faster to load if you're on SSD based on my experiences. But it's insignificant performance gain and not really worth it.

Get your favourite text editor at your finger tips whenever it is Vim, some variant of EMACS, SublimeText, notepad.exe or something.

Open up "settings.ini" file from the "C:\dk_tools\" folder.

See the line where it says "LastProject=" and add path to settings.prj which will be located inside dk_tools directory after we create it. So in this guide we write "LastProject=C:\dk_tools\settings.prj" and it will look like this:



Now save the file. Next open up Windows cmd.exe and navigate into "c:\dk_tools\" and run dkdir. This can be done for example by doing...

• Press Win-key+R and then in the "Run..." prompt type cmd.exe and press enter. You'll see Windows Command Prompt open up.
  
• Type:
  cls
• Type:
  cd c:\dk_tools\
• Type:
  dkdir.bat c:\\dk_dev\\ c:\\dk_map\\

WARNING: If you don't use double dashes then things will break! This is a batch script that generates settings.prj file for you and does other things like copy colormap.bmp into Daikatana's folder. Do not delete that file!



Next we do want to inspect the settings.prj file to see that everything's in order. If you know what you're doing feel free to edit the file. I haven't touched it apart from just ensuring that the paths work as intended. You might want to do the same.


Something like above should be there. If it has double dashes or something it might prevent autosave function from working in ION Radiant. Or textures might not be fetched correctly and shown in the editor.


Next we're going to add C:\dk_tools\ permanently into Windows PATH. This is done for the sake of our sanity but it can break your Windows if you're not careful. So please be careful!

What you'll need is three local variables which are:

Key: GAMEDIR
Value: C:\dk_dev\

Key: DKMAPS
Value: C:\dk_map\

Key: path
Value: <whatever it already has>;C:\dk_tools\;

See the screenshot for reference:



If you've done everything correctly you're ready to launch the IonRadiant editor. Run ionradian.exe located in the C:\dk_tools\ directory. You'll see a dialog box which asks you to set some preferences. Click ok.

Next a preferences dialog window will open up and it shows you editor preferences. If you don't have any previous experience with any other editor then don't touch anything and just click ok. Everything has already been set to decent defaults.



Some people however might want to use different window order if they're coming from Valve Hammer or UnrealEd or something. If you have extremely high DPI mouse you might want to slow down camera to next to zero or switch your mouse to 450dpi mode with 125Mhz polling or something. But try the defaults first. You can always come back later to edit preferences to your liking.

Next you should see the editor and pop up window comes and asks location of settings.prj file. Select settings.prj project file and then click open.

After this IonRadiant is likely to ask you if you want to load and build a default project. Answer no to this question. It's highly recommended at this point that now that all the editor's preferences have been made that you quit the IonRadiant.exe from File->Exit and then re-run the editor to ensure that the editor will save your preferences to Windows Registry as intended.



Now you should be ready to do maps for Daikatana in IonRadiant. In next chapter we'll construct a basic room with all sorts of extras that the game world is made from.

The objective of this guide is that you'll be able to recreate something like this on your own.


But that's slightly beyond the basics. What we're going to do now is that I want you to get familiar with the editor. Instead of making you guys read I went and created a video for you. Pause the video and do and try the stuff I do on it. I'll add link to keyboard cheatsheet later here.


Before you do anything you need to know that in Quake engine and derivative game engines you make rooms to be "water-proof" so that light cannot escape into the void. When the your map is not "water-proof" it will leak and that that will cause the map to fail to work.

That is quite different from the Unreal engine's "everything inside blocks works" approach which has different set of advantages and disadvantages to Quake engine's approach.

There's nothing really exceptional with these things. You basically just place them into the map and they should work as they are. However you sometimes might want to create round objects like wheels or you might want to create terrain with height differences. That's when we start using vertex editor in IonRadiant.

We also have variety of Daikatana specific lighting tricks available for us that allow us to paint the game world in various colours. However don't over do the lighting. Think what makes sense. This is especially important when we start using transparent textures in metal floors. We cannot just throw ♥♥♥♥ there and expect it to look good. We might need animated textures when creating waterfalls and teleport surfaces. There are few technical limitations too that we must worry about.

Here's a second part that goes over some of these topics but I got side-tracked pretty badly so it doesn't have a real common thread to follow through. But people asked me to upload and enable it anyway so here it is. I'll improve this set of tutorial videos over the time.