Harmony Lost

[Crow]

Well... i dunno XD

I could hazard a guess and say my map making skills, though pretty(in a half life-ish way), are not very refined. I'm self taught, I just kinda started mapping, and have only learned how to make efficeint (as in optimization for less lag) maps through the scolding of others.

 

[Thothie]

Okay, I think I found your problem and its a fairly simple fix. I'm compiling it now, and its gonna take a damn long while due to the HLRAD phase, but it got past the HLCSG phase, which is where it stores the wads, so it should compile for ya.

Basically the issue that seems to be effing with HLCSG's mind is that your Null texture is non-existant - you need a placeholder image for it. Break open Wally, and stick a Null texture from this wad into Crow2.wad (or just import all the textures from this wad, as there are some other useful mapping textures in there):
http://www.thothie.com/ms/hlbasics.wad

You can make your own 16x16 null texture if you wish (actually, I dont think size is important, just any texture named "NULL").

You should be able to use the -nowadtextures flag on the HLCSG then, works for me at least. It adds very little to the map size. However, some of the Null textures you put down ARE visible, so you are going to have to go through and rethink some of them. Seems you have some in every copy of that lamp that are visible.

If you want to save yourself the trouble of hunting down all those visible nulls and have the Half-Life Tool Kit, you can open the map in QUARK. From there, expand the Miptex section, cut/delete the Null texture, and then copy and paste the {invisible texture. This will replace all the Nulls with Invisibles, so no one will be the wiser. Still, would be best to remove the exposed Nulls.

Map Optimizations: While this fooker was compiling, I took a look to see what could be optimized in the map. I must say this map is more FPS friendly than most of your maps, but there are a few spots where I get 90FPS, and one spot where I get 80FPS (and again, this usually means everyone else gets 20 and 5, except Cyax, who becomes frozen in time ).

The primary trick to getting good FPS is to make sure the player sees the least number of brushes (and vertexes) possible.

That ceiling is obviously the result of a terrain tutorial that really should be banned from the internet. I think most of your FPS problems are generated by that. It's simply far too complicated. I realize it's also a pain to replace.

You need to stop using thin little walls at the map edges, and you need to conform to the grid. In addition to performance increase and ease of alignment, this also makes leaks easier to detect (I see you kinda, almost boxed your map to nail the some you didn't find - some of your outer walls aren't joined).

You got a lot of overlapping textures, and shapes that could be further simplified. The water entrance to the spider area could be done with 2 brushes, instead of the overlapping eight you have there. Regarding the boxes in the attic: there are many groups of boxes there that could be reduced to a single brush just by letting the texture tile, and it wouldn't look any different. The pretty lamp you duplicated several times has four overlapping brushes that could be reduced to a single brush (or at least made not to overlap).

Where you have windows, you have frames that are only about a single unit extruded from the window - you midas well use the texture itself for the frame, and save yourself four brushes per window. In addition, the walls on the buildings should only be broken where the windows are, and be a single brush for the rest of the area they take up, rather than three stretching for the length of the building.

Your floors should not extend to the outside of the buildings they belong to. Make your floors stop inside the walls. Otherwise HL will try to render those floors and all the brushes touching them.

The other major FPS whore is, of course, that beautiful building on the hill with the attic and the pathway leading up to it. You have a lot of segmented brushes in it foundation that could be merged into one, with no visible difference. There's not a lot else I could see to do to that, other than what I've already mentioned. It is true you don't need the garden to have brushes stretching in both directions. You could save a few polys by removing those plants that are running paralell with the player's POV - as he won't normally see them anyways.

You also have several places where players can get stuck - put clipbrushes on them. Remember clipbrushes don't render, so you can overlap them all you want.

There's other stuff, but as per usual, I can write a book. Very nice map though, despite all my constructive criticism.

Crow isn't on the team, I think, more due to the fact that they don't need mappers at this point than anything else. Seems the only thing they are short on are modelers. I can't model ATM (at least not using any software compatible with HL), however, I have access to the source of some models the dev team might find useful.

Hopefully, the mysterious custom content system of MS:C will allow Crow to continue to develop expansions for the game.
_________________
“The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.” — Albert Einstein letter to Sigmund Freud July 30, 1932
Saint Thoth

 

[Crow]

Yea... well thanks that actually does help alot, now I know what not to do it the future. If somehow i ever become... not lazy, i'll fix all that stuff I figure, well, its a city map. No action, no fighting, so lag is nothing more then annoying. If there was battles and crap going on, lag would be a much bigger concern, so ill make sure to the best of my ability that the rest of the maps, which should all have fighting and stuff in them, wont be so detail intensive and will keep all that stuff in mind when i make them.

As for the null texutre, i have the zhlt wad. which has the null texture in it.

When me and J-M tried to figure it out, as far as we could tell, from looking at the log, it seemed everything worked fine, but when running the map, it stilll asked for the wads, so... i dunno

EDIT:
also, if I put clip brushes in areas of my map that players should not go, like, the sky, will that help any?

 

[Thothie]

The standard ZHLT doesn't seem to have a null texture in it, which is odd. The wad I gave you there has some other useful tools as well (material sound textures, etc).

Adding clipbrushes will cut down on clipplanes which reduces compile time a lot. But for FPS it helps only slightly though it does help HLVIS optimize better.

Placing null textures between brushes that obscure one another's sides completely doesn't help. Null textures only affect compile, not the in game rendering. HLVIS is smart enough to ignore textures completely obscured by the sides of another brush - so you can save yourself some work by not bothering to retexture unexposed brush sides.

I'm thinking what we need is some creative hint/skip brushes in this map, but I've never gotten the nack of those myself.

As for the wad error you have there, although it shouldn't happen, try ripenting the map, and removing the custom wad dependencies from the worldspawn entitity, and see if it'll still load without purple textures. Didn't have that issue with my compile.
_________________
"Who was it that decided the birds are free?" - Sanzo
Saint Thoth

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

Sorry if I might've missed something, but Crow and I did *not* try -nowadtextures.

We tried -wadinclude. And it never worked. We both tried like three times with (fully working) Batch files. But the compiled map either
-still asks for the WAD
-shows all "included" textures as black-pink checker boards.

This crap is defect as far as I can tell which obviously sucks seeing as how Crow likes to bomb us with huge WAD files.

Ideas?

 

[Crow]

meh, so i mixed up the name

LIKE WHATEVER 8)

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

Silence, WADman, for this might be thy only savior!

 

[Thothie]

Hmmm... Very odd... -nowadtextures works fine for me, no purple textures, no wad requests. I even made a slightly optimized version of the map and that worked too.

Here's my batch file (one of two that work, this is the slower)

@echo off
set WADROOT=G:\Games\Steam\SteamApps\thothie\dedicated server\valve
title Compiling %1.bsp
hlcsg -nowadtextures -low "%1.map"
hlbsp -low "%1.map"
hlvis -low -full "%1.map"
hlrad -chop 64 -texchop 64 -low -verbose -extra "%1.map"
copy %1.bsp "G:\Games\Steam\SteamApps\thothie\half-life\valve\maps\%1.bsp"
rem copy %1.bsp "G:\Games\Steam\SteamApps\thothie\half-life\ns\maps\%1.bsp"
copy %1.bsp "G:\Games\Steam\SteamApps\thothie\half-life\ms\maps\%1.bsp"
beep
beep
beep
notepad %1.log
rem G:\Games\Steam\Steam.exe -applaunch 70 -particles 1024 -game valve

and the fastie:

@echo off
set WADROOT=G:\Games\Steam\SteamApps\thothie\dedicated server\valve
title Compiling %1.bsp
hlcsg -nowadtextures -low "%1.map"
hlbsp -low "%1.map"
hlvis -low -fast "%1.map"
hlrad -nolerp -chop 128 -texchop 128 -low "%1.map"
copy %1.bsp "G:\Games\Steam\SteamApps\thothie\half-life\valve\maps\%1.bsp"
copy %1.bsp "G:\Games\Steam\SteamApps\thothie\half-life\valve\maps\%1.pts"
copy %1.bsp "G:\Games\Steam\SteamApps\thothie\half-life\ms\maps\%1.bsp"
beep
beep
beep
notepad %1.log
pause
rem G:\Games\Steam\Steam.exe -applaunch 70 -particles 1024 -game valve

Both work by batchfile mapname (sans the .bsp/.map)

I'll send up the optimized version after I tweak it some more. I changed the lighting effects a bit and made the lights and barrels breakable (some have prizes, but nothing valuable). Put a slight hint for that crate puzzle too.

Also gotta add monsterclip brushes. The off duty waitress will wander up cliffs, and even into the water!

BTW, how did you get her to change her script to "off duty mode"? Do you have a list of NPC scripts that I don't?
_________________
"We demand guaranteed, rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty." - Vroomfondel, a philosopher, HGTG
Saint Thoth

 

[Crow]

lol... i didnt know there was a difference with the waitress, maybe 2 versions..?

Thanx for optimizing it for meh and such

 

[Thothie]

BTW, I dont seem to have the ambient sound: Crow2/Amb/Other/Caveloop.wav

Is this a custom sound, or is there an Half-Life equivalent I can redirect the ambient to?
_________________
"Compiling tweaked Underkeep2 now..."
Saint Thoth

 

[Crow]

Oh that... heh i made that. Ill upload it real quick

EDIT: or not... i get some error: 500 Connection refused (Winsock error #10061)

guess ill just find somwhere to host it
(Right click -> Save as)
here

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

Hmmm... Very odd... -nowadtextures works fine for me, no purple textures, no wad requests. I even made a slightly optimized version of the map and that worked too.

No, no, no.
-nowadtextures includes *all* full WAD files that are used in the map.
-wadinclude includes only the used custom textures from the custom WAD files you specify, therefore it's better.

I can't get the second one to work (never tried -nowadtextures by the way).

 

[Thothie]

No, no, no.
-nowadtextures includes *all* full WAD files that are used in the map.
-wadinclude includes only the used custom textures from the custom WAD files you specify, therefore it's better.

Eh, I don't think you'd want to use -wadInclude. If he used Crow2.wad, it'd simply merge his 30mb wad file into the bsp. His only other option would be to make an entirely new wad with just the textures the map uses, and I know no easy way to generate one. -nowadtextures hunts down all the non-Half-Life textures you used and merges them with the BSP, so me think its the best option here. It added less than 800k to the map size. (Then I redid the lighting, which added another 3mb )

500 Connection refused (Winsock error #10061)

Yer Winderz FTP services be jammed, ye must be rebootin'.

But yeah, got it. Not too different from ambience/drips.wav or ambience/aliencave.wav in the Valve set. I think the way you have it setup there it'll only loop once. I fixed that, then decided it was too loud, and probably shouldn't play indoors, so then I opted to just make multiple cycling ambient generics with that wav throughout the map.

When you make the .res file for this map, make damn sure you include all the custom sounds, models, and sprites. (Although, mayhaps that wav is the only one?)

I'm afraid my FPS gain for this map wasn't all that much (maybe 20-30% reduct on polys), although I didn't do as much as I could, as I got stuck. The reason being that your FGD is apparently slightly different from mine, or I fuxed mine up. The place holder for ms_npc is a different size, I guess, and this apparently made a bunch of NPCs disappear through the floor (which explains the wandering waitress - who apparently wasn't supposed to be outside at all!) Took me a damn long time to figure out that was the issue. I'll be sending you the source, hopefully you don't have to reposition NPC's to make it compile right under your FGD.

CAN WE PLEASE GET AN OFFICIAL FGD SO WE DON'T SEE THIS SORT OF STUPIDITY! [/rant]

Anyways, I have two versions cooking. On both of them I replaced all the light fixtures, but I have two types and I couldn't figure which to go with. On one I have the light fixtures designed so their frames block light, and make for a more realistic, but sometimes distracting lighting effect. On the other, I've removed that. In both cases they are breakable, and any light they cast through windows will also go out when they are broken.

I also added EAX effects to doors, so when you're out in the open cave, you'll get the cavernous echo, but when you're indoors, you won't get any such. This won't affect you if you don't have a sound card that supports EAX.

Also added a cluster of dripping stalagmites (or is it tites? I can never remember) and some moths for good measure, along with a few new ambients. ...And a storyboard entrance for those that enter through the _begin instead of one of the _spawns. (Plus you can enter the map through standard Half-Life if you have the required MS bits).

Do you have photoshop? I can send you the PSD source for the storyboard in case you want to add your own and keep them consistent looking throughout the series.
_________________
"Kovac's Conundrum: When you dial a wrong number, you never get a busy signal."
Saint Thoth

PS. Sidenote: when you say "ale" to the waitress in Edana, she gives you ale. The Underkeep waitress says she's too busy. I guess that's her default behavior, and you need to add the edana npc_script if you want her to serve her customers. (Explains some of my confusion at least)

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

Thothie, straight from the source,

http://www.zhlt.info/command-reference.html

 

[Thothie]

Ah, I thought it just glued the whole Wad to the BSP. Oh well, either way in this case it's gonna be the same size. I also don't know if you can make -wadinclude work with multiple wads. (Plus, apparently, -wadinclude isn't working for him). (BTW: Could we cut and paste text instead of stretching the whole damn forum out with a JPG? [resize that!])

This one uses -nowadtextures, the total size is 6.8MB (from the original 5.9MB) - most of that, however, is due to the new lighting system I installed. It has no wad file dependencies what-so-ever (tried and tested)... I consider it a 29MB reduction in anycase.

http://www.thothie.com/ms/underkeep2_fancylights.rar

That includes a res file (btw, you also forgot "crow/pubmusic.wav"), changelog, and the source RMF. (edit: and the PSD basis for the storyboard.)

Looking at it, more and more, I don't like the new lighting system. I'll have a underkeep2_simplelights ready for you by tomorrow. Today Agnus is tied up converting some DVD's to MOV format (I don't criticize the stupidity, I just do what they pay me for).

Also note to Crow: you can spawn every ms_NPC on that map with a single monsterspawn, if you tie them all to a monsterspawn with a spawnloc set to 0 - the NPCs will then spawn where you place them, instead of at the monsterspawn. This doesn't change performance, but saves you work.
_________________
"Respect the gods and the devils, but keep them at a distance." - Confucius
Saint Thoth

 

[Crow]

Whoa. I wondered how the hell in thornlands the monsters all had the same spawn area name, but spawned in different places. Lawl.


Anyways... You changed the name of the .bsp file! ARG now the transitions to that map wont work. Everyone change the name to Underkeep.bsp so they will work

Everything seems alot darker, and it looks... weird. =\ but otherwise i like all the additions/changes made. Especially when barrals randomly spawn a pile of logs when broken XD

 

[Thothie]

You can always rename it.

I'll get you one with less weird/dark lighting tomorrow, I dun think I like the way it came out either.

Should be only one barrel with a log in it. I was running out of ideas of worthless things to put in barrels... I think the rest have apples, and such... Although one has a spider.
_________________
"Many a family tree needs trimming."
Saint Thoth

 

[Thothie]

Here's the simple lighting version:

http://www.thothie.com/ms/underkeep2_simplelights_A.rar

Looks more like the original. I kept some of the inside lights fancy, as it looked less jarring indoors, but all the outdoor ones are unobstructed. I'm not bothering sending the source on this one, as its the same map, just changed the frames of the outdoor lights to func_wall.

Sadly, this introduced a new problem with the ceiling lighting... *sigh*... I'd undo most of my FPS optimization if I go back to the original ceiling. Maybe I can salvage this one with some work, but I got stuffs been piling up here, I dunno when I'll get the chance to try.
_________________
"Celibacy is not Hereditary."
Saint Thoth

 

[Crow]

Yea, that looks alot better. Your right about the ceiling...weird, but no biggy. Great sounds