[NEEDS INFO] [Solved] help mapping

Hi poeple, I am a bit confuse and I have just some little questions.
1- In a space map does all brushes have to be details brushes? Look at this screenshot, this map is made from brushes and patchs mixed:


2- Also, if I well anderstood they are no needs to put some hint brushes. Is it all wright?

3- The last time it took about 10 days to compile. I had made all brushes structural. Whas it a big mistake?

4- Another point I wonder is the number of tris make the compile so long?


I noticed more I add lights more the compile time is long, it is exponential!

I am waitjng for your advices.
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Thank you all of you, your advices helped me. Now last compile took about 40 minutes.

1:
Nope. It's not an easy question, but I'll try to tell my experiences. Also, it clearly shows you don't understand what's a detail and what's a structural brush
So. When you compile the "vis" stage, it's an abbreviation for visibility. That means, you'll have large, invisible cubes in your map, the so called "vis blocks". You can set the parameters of this block with a switch of q3map2, but this is not needed here.
To achieve this, q3map2 splits up the 3D space with planes, so called "vis portals". Think about these as invisible walls. The surface of these walls are made ALONG THE SURFACE OF STRUCTURAL BRUSHES. And caulk. And of course, along the walls of the vis blocks.
Are you still with me? If not, load up a map in Xonotic, and use r_drawportals 1.
Vis calculation does exactly, what it says: if you're in point A, and you look to direction B to point C, what can you see? r rather, what shall the engine see and render at the same time! Those things are not the same. You can clearly see this, if you enable:
r_showtris 1
r_showdisabledepthtest 1 (no, this is NOT a built in wallhack, this is a developer tool, intended for debugging vis problems).

Look around now. If you see only parts of the map in wire render, vis is working. If you see the wireframe of the whole effin' map, with all the entities too, you're in deep shit of vis problems my friend Cause the more you see, the more the engine has to actually render, so the more FPS that drains.
After we understand now, what vis does, here are some rule of thumbs:

A vis portal is generated on every:
-surface of visblocks
-surface of structural brushes
-surface of HINT brushes (later explained)
-brush surfaces, textured with CAULK.

Vis is NOT blocked by:
-patches
-models
-DETAIL brushes

Now, knowing all of these... Open space maps, like your or Newtonian Nightmare are a big pain in the ass for vis. Why? Because where ever you look at, you can almost see everything, so vis doesn't really help you. What you can try to do, is to move your map, so it better fits to visblocks (you can enable showing them in radiant), or try out HINT brushes.
Brushes textured with HINT forces the compile to make vis portals, where it normally won't create any. Hint is very good at corners, it can help you a lot (hint brushes are hidden by default in radiant, as they can overlap, and create a very big mess on 2D and 3D view. Look at Leave'em behind for an example). Placing hint brushes can help you improve performance, but it's hard to do, and requires a lot practice, to do it right.

So, if you understood all of these, you'll understand now why it was a very bad idea, to make the whole map structural, as every tiny bit of brush surface will make a vis portal, and for that, the compiler will have to calculate, what can be seen from there.

For the lights, there's another stage of compile, the light stage. What it does, it calculates the light and shadow falloff of light of surfaces, or individual light entities. This is a complex calculation, and it indeed can last for a long time. But there are numerous ways to speed this up. Namely, q3map2 can compile light in different quality. If you only want a test compile, it's advised to use the lower quality ones, and only use full quality on the end product. Note howeever, that the test compiles are always dimmer, than the high quality one, and don't have pretty shadows either.

Hope I could help.

make me a map :p

and gl!

t

:^

+1 for C.Brutail, very good explanation! But why did your compile last 10 days?!? My maps only last some minutes to compile or one hour, although I have a lot of lights and complex structure in it. It may be helpful for me to have a look at your map-file, then I could exactly say what caused this extremely long compile-time.

1 - I presume almost everything should be detail here, except for 4 main platform brushes and the one at the top.
2 - Some useful hint division can still be done here, although I doubt you'll win much.
3 - wait what
4 - what wait

Maddin is right, if you share us the map file it'd be easier to help you.

If you dont want to share it publicly send us a PM.

My biggest map takes 20 hours to build and believe me, its a huge map.
It takes 10 secs on BSP, 10 secs on VIS 10 secs on minimap and 20 hours in lights....

My friend C.Brutail, I am underestimated!
I have read all what forseti told me in " http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=2072 " A link posted to him by Maddin, also I did open maps, I followed all maddin's advices in other posts
So
I do anderstand all of 3 compil stages and you confirm what I though and what I have read about that, sorry to have waisted your time but what you wrote does not help :-). Vis calculation is good 'cause the engine does a good job if I r_showtris 1. I conclude It is not a vis problem. Plus r_drawportals 1 give a descent split of areas.

I will follow the Lord Canistra's advice wich is near to what I though.

To compile I use the option (final)(approved)(and recommended) wich is
-meta -v -samplesize 8 -minsamplesize 4
-vis -saveprt
-light -randomsamples -samples 4 -lightmapsize 512 -bounce 8 -fastbounce -bouncegrid
-minimap
May be I should twick that! What should I use as command parameters for that kind of map?

anyway, it seems that I face an obscured problem.

Next time I will try to compile only the light stage because they will be only a slight change in the light environment. I am sure it is that stage that is too long in my case.
I forgot to say even I use a low light calculation the compil time still too long.

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If you dont want to share it publicly send us a PM.

Ok I accept your help forseti, thank you.

I´d recommend to write your own build-option. This way you can set the right things. For your map I wouldn´t use bounce, fastbounce and bouncegrid. They make the map only too bright and the compile-time extremely raises. Try it out without the bounce-parameters then I´m sure it won´t last 10 days to compile!

If you dont want to share it publicly send us a PM.

Ok I accept your help forseti, thank you.

So you sent him the map-file? Would be very nice if you also sent it to me.

Wow, I've got something, I loaded the .prt file from the plugin tools. The vis stage has put portals between the 3 rooms not connected. (teleporter access for two rooms and a projected skybox room)



I will put hint brushes between the boxes. I will see if some other tools can help me for something else.

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A brush between each box like this

Is it ok? or do I have to surround each box with hint brushes?

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Well, surrounded.

You probably should try adding -fast to the light stage.

This option does NOT reduce quality, but switches to another algorithm for lighting that turns off lights earlier at a distance. If you intend your map's lighting for that option, then it is absolutely no problem to have it set in the final compile.

The only problem you could get is with skyboxes using surfacelight instead of skylight.

Maybe blocksize 0, as Maddin mentioned in other topic would come in handy here. Open worldspawn parameters (select simple un-grouped brush and press N) and add "_blocksize" "0 0 0" keyvalue (without quotes).

I´m confused; why are there portals in the void?!? Or did you hide some brushes?

I´m confused; why are there portals in the void?!? Or did you hide some brushes?

If someone ask you about that just tell them you do'nt know