mapping problem

[Vomica7]

i was testing my map and there were black blotches all over the place, wtf mate?

 

[Vomica7]

well you know what it really doesnt matter, i give up.
has mapping for hl1 always been this shit'ty? i made a simple fuck'ing cliff and they are all invalid solid structures. :|

fuck that. im gonna wait untill MS:S needs maps.

 

[Thothie]

Ya can't "twist" solids in HL1 (I dunno about source). Gotta make sure all the planes are flat linear - limits what you can do with a single solid, although with several brushes, there's not much limit, at least not until ye get so many the r_speeds go to hell.

Just obey the ten commandments in the mapping tutorial and ye should be fine.

 

[Crow]

Vomica, you make me lol

 

[evilsquirrel]

just stay away from vertex manip and you'll be fine...it likes to make loads of more of those errers

 

[Vomica7]

stay away from carving and vertex manipulating?
then how do i make terrain? :/

 

[evilsquirrel]

i shall have to make tutorials for all these new (and new to hl1) mappers...

you dont HAVE to stay away from carve - all these other people yelling about "CARVESUX" are just trying to protect nubs from being confused.

carve is a very useful tool, and it works fine so long as you use it only on simple objects and save before each carve.


as for now, experiment with the clip tool - you'll find you can make terrain fairly easily with it.

 

[PBarnum]

just stay away from vertex manip and you'll be fine...it likes to make loads of more of those errers

vertex manip is my candy land. I love that tool. though you need a lot of errors to finally know how to use it

 

[evilsquirrel]

no, you need someone to show you how to use it properly to not get errors...

 

[Vomica7]

yeah i know how to map, i used to map a long time ago.
i made some pretty badass sh*t.
but never have i encountered something like this.
:|



haha i learned the trick, everytime you do something check for errors.

 

[evilsquirrel]

that'd fix most of it.

 

[Vomica7]

omg, im in heaven.
mapping and dane cook.
:drool:

 

[evilsquirrel]

what are you making...anyways..?

 

[Vomica7]

dwarven mines map

 

[Thothie]

you dont HAVE to stay away from carve - all these other people yelling about "CARVESUX" are just trying to protect nubs from being confused.

carve is a very useful tool, and it works fine so long as you use it only on simple objects and save before each carve.

NEVER use CARVE. It NEVER stays to the grid! You can get all sorts of bogus errors out of it, that may or may not show up until dozens or even hundreds of brushes later, causing you to have to start your whole map over from scratch, as you'll never be able to find the bit causing the overflow. This isn't just to avoid confusing nubs - it's something vet mappers just plain do not do, having made enough maps to learn the hard way.

If you want to re-align every vertex to the grid afterwards, you may stand a chance in hell - but that's only useful for VERY simple objects - and in such cases - the carve isn't worth doing to begin with.

You have to remember Hammer thinks in RMF, and the compilers think in MAP. There's floating point discrepancies between the formulas used to generate the two formats. Meaning if you have an odd vertex, anywhere, it can wind up not causing any problems for a long time, and then suddenly one day, the whole map is corrupt for no apparent reason. (Plus you tend to get bogus node construction well before then which tends to send your r_speeds through the roof.)

It's quite easy to do terrain and caves without carve/hollow, and you will find you will have much more control and said terrain will be generated much more smoothly if you avoid them. In addition you have much more control over where brush splitting occurs, so you'll have much better r_speeds. You can use vertex manip and the clip tool to achieve just about anything, just be sure all your planes are indeed planes, and not curved surfaces.

There's yonder Terrain Tutorial but I'd avoid making anything as complex as shown in that particular tutorial - rather tis just one good example of how you can go about doing things.

 

[Vomica7]

i carve and then vertex manipulate to make sure they are on the grid.

is that okay?

 

[Thothie]

It's very risky. You have to make sure every last vertex is snapped back into place, and as I said, if there were so few vertexes that you can do that practically - the object was too simple to bother carving to begin with. This may also result in invalid objects, as carve will often 'offset' solids slightly to make it possible to generate the crap it does without generating too many itself - so often some of the solids it generates can't be manipulated proper.

 

[evilsquirrel]

bleh, i shall continue to use it to make doorways

 

[Thothie]

*sigh* You'll find out the hard way like Crow, and somewhat ironically, KungFuSquirrel did. Five months of mapping down the drain.

Anyone who's done mapping long enough comes to dearly regret violating every one of those commandments sooner or later. Few people learn from the mistakes of others.

 

[Crow]

hehe

i never (ever)^10^10^10 use carve.

ever.










ever.

 

[evilsquirrel]

good thing i keep backed up versions of maps incase something irreversible goes wrong.

 

[Vomica7]

i dont make brushes that have more than 6 faces.

 

[evilsquirrel]

but i like my 16 sided brushes.

 

[Thothie]

good thing i keep backed up versions of maps incase something irreversible goes wrong.

Won't do you any good, as KungFu discovered, you have to delete all the brushes back to the time you did the carve - as all the ones afterwards get corrupted in the save (offset by .000001 units, or whatever the overflow is.)

You CAN however, get away with brushes with more than 6 sides, it's just generally best to split them instead.

Or as Saint Tommy14 said in his tutorial in his anti-hollow speech, "Think of it not as a box - but as a room with 6 sides."

 

[PBarnum]

I think everyone is forgetting my beautiful complex cave job in ms_snow.

I DID THE CAVE PART IN THAT MAP!!!!

sorry, I just get a little frustrated when people dont credit me when they know I did it.

people who dont know, its ok.