[WIP]RUN

[littleaznboi]

I didn't see that part before. And no I don't have test characters or developer commands. You can PM those to me if you want. Just a thought here, but do you think it would be a good idea to retexture the inside of the mansion to a K-cult theme? Then maybe add the iron fortress like you said in that one area.

 

[J]

A couple of small suggestions about texturing. In that one picture where you're using the same texture for the walls and the floor, try changing the floor texture. In the first picture, you can reduce the polycount a bit by stretching the textures, the rocks would probably even look better as the repetition of the texture pattern wouldn't be so obvious.

Other than that looks pretty good.

Edit: looks like that bed in the second picture is full of rocks

 

[Thothie]

Just a thought here, but do you think it would be a good idea to retexture the inside of the mansion to a K-cult theme? Then maybe add the iron fortress like you said in that one area.

K-cult, Undead, bandits, orcs, Goldilocks and the Three Kodiaks... Whatever ya want, tis up to you - just get rid of the Wolfenstein swastikas.

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

Thothie,

littleaznboi just ran into this problem and wanted me to have a look at it:

So he sent me the map and I went to the above coordinates only to find two perfectly normal brushes that touch at a perfectly normal 90 degree angle, textured in perfectly normal textures (no texture axes perpendicular to faces or nothin'). After replacing some textures I didn't have I figured I'd try to compile it again and oddly enough I got kicked in the balls with MAX_MAP_PATCHES once again.

How on earth did you compile this map??? It won't compile for me. I'm going to fiddle around with -chop and -texchop values but I'm wondering if you can share your mega leet hax compile.

 

[Thothie]

Thothie,

littleaznboi just ran into this problem and wanted me to have a look at it:

So he sent me the map and I went to the above coordinates only to find two perfectly normal brushes that touch at a perfectly normal 90 degree angle, textured in perfectly normal textures (no texture axes perpendicular to faces or nothin'). After replacing some textures I didn't have I figured I'd try to compile it again and oddly enough I got kicked in the balls with MAX_MAP_PATCHES once again.

How on earth did you compile this map??? It won't compile for me. I'm going to fiddle around with -chop and -texchop values but I'm wondering if you can share your mega leet hax compile.

Didn't use -textchop, compiles fine for me. :\ Granted, I don't have his version - just the one I linked there. Aside from the cyilnder trees slicing through everything, the map's pretty uniform and even basic, nothing odd or chaotic going on here save maybe some overzealous terrain deformation, but even that's all to grid.

My compile params:
hlcsg -low "%1.map" -nowadtextures %2 %3 %4 %5
hlbsp -low "%1.map" %2 %3 %4 %5
hlvis -low -estimate -full "%1.map" %2 %3 %4 %5
hlrad -threads 3 -high -estimate -extra -sparse -lights "lights.rad" "%1.map" %2 %3 %4 %5 -nolog

 

[littleaznboi]

I didn't do anything wrong, hopefully, just did my part, with the house, mansions, etc. I did a compile without RAD and it worked fine, no leaks or anything. When I went to go test run it on my listen server off FN, it just crashes went it goes to switch to that map.

 

[Thothie]

Well, send it my way and I'll see what I can do. Wouldn't be the first time I had to beat a mysterious Bad Surface Extents error that ZHLT didn't catch.

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

It's compiling as we speak with -chop 96 and -texchop 48 by the way.

Edit: And it compiled and I'm running around in it right now. No bad surface extents or anything. I did click "World" in the Face Properties menu on the aforementioned brushes that were supposedly giving the error (forgot to mention this, sorry) but Hammer didn't find any errors before and after I did that.
So I *might* have fixed the problem without even realizing it but then again, it might just pop up out of nowhere again. Because this is (if you ask me) a pretty sloppy map. Too complicated.

 

[littleaznboi]

(if you ask me) a pretty sloppy map. Too complicated.

Hell to the YEA!

 

[Thothie]

Ehhh... It's nearly exponentially simpler than your Islesofdread2, both statistically speaking, and in layout. Islesofdread2 has 264 discarded brushes (vs. Run2's 42), a 123% texture overflow (vs. Run2's 67% underflow), and nearly double the number of model brushes. Albeit, Isleofdread2 is one of the most complicated maps I've ever seen, and Run2's clipnodes are much closer to its than they should be, for the much simpler design.

It's really a very simple map. The only thing that causes any complications (and clipnodes), aside from the trees, is again, the terrain - which is all legit - just too dense and corse. If you flattened it all, it'd look even more painfully plain, but I bet it'd compile in 5 seconds flat (vs. the 6 minutes I get now). The inside areas (eg. the mansion) are about the simplest half-life geometry I've ever seen.

There's a lot of brightly lit surface, so I could see where you might get to the point where you need to use the -texchop, but I've never had to thus far. Lest the mansion was very brightly lit or lit with a lot of shifting lights, I don't think you'd need to until you built another lit structure.

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

264 discarded brushes

What's a discarded brush anyway...? Hammer doesn't give me any errors, the compile log didn't give me any errors and in-game betatesting with over ten different people in multiple sessions didn't give me any errors.

 

[Thothie]

ZHLT announces discarded brushes as part of the HLCSG log (first line after the wadinclude list). Usually it means a brush it couldn't integrate into the clipping hull properly due to an unusual shape, but it can also mean a brush that doesn't need to be there (ie. is completely covered, or doesn't fall into the inside hull at all or it otherwise cannot build a collision model for.) The brush may still appear on the map, but it will have no clip structure (effectively a walk-through func_illusionary that blocks vis). It will also will skew the results of any vis node built for it, if it's visible.

Sometimes they can be real bad... I remember walking through whole sections of Dridje's Gert. Caves in one compile. That map's much simpler than either of these, but unlike like these, a lot of the brushes are built very badly, and some of these deformed brushes were copy-pasta'd to create new areas. At least in these maps, nearly every brush is either a simple box or a wedge.

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

I thought these were (mostly) func_illusionary or other brushes that are supposed to be non-solid...?
There's a very large amount of func_illusionary in my islesofdread2 remake.

 

[Thothie]

I shouldn't have used the term func_illusionary... HLCSG's discarded brush report comes before it checks for entity descriptions or null brushes. It doesn't report entity brushes whose collisions would be discarded due to their type unless you use both -verbose and -noclip, and then it doesn't appear to process that until after it goes through the CreateBrush process, and reports them individually. Rather, I simply meant, that the offending brush would be walked through in much the same way an illusionary would, but without the entity overhead, and with the ability to block vis and fux up nodes.

Usually they are a sign of something crooked or lazy going on, but I notice some mappers will "fill space" to even out the outside of their hulls for more visual symetry, and mappers who do this generate a lot of these. However, being utilitarian, they usually null them, so they don't add to patches or face counts, even if they aren't discarded. Sometimes the laziness is just having placed another brush over older brushes without having removed them (for instance, placing an altar on top of a floor of fancy tiles, without removing the tiles beneath). In this case they have no ill effect except to bring you closer to the max brush count prematurely. The only time they are a real problem is when they are large, oddly shaped or off-grid brushes within the game map, or along the walls, or worse, floor. Falling off your map is always embarassing.

 

[littleaznboi]

Update!

Brush Work: 85%? ( Wanting to put that iron fortress in that unfinished area. Also really liking J-M's idea of a imposing teleporter to some dungeon of sorts underground , no idea how to do these )
Lighting: 5% ( I don't know much about lighting but I'll give it a shot :? )
Texturing: 90%
Entities: 35% ( Some monsters in place)

School is starting in 2 days! booo so my progress on the map will slow quite a bit. Hopefully I'll have it finished withing the month or early next month.

 

[Thothie]

I had an optimization thought for this map that would help reduce clip nodes and may eliminate the last of the vis leaf portal errors.

Select all the trees, make them func_illusionary (in small groups, as they are func_wall now), and then draw player clip boxes around them (ie. boxes painted entirely with the CLIP texture). Where the ground is uneven, make these boxes so they nearly (but not quite) touch the ground (just so they are low enough that the player can't slip under them). The tops should go to the sky box or tree brush where possible, but if there's uneven ceiling involved, just make sure they are high enough that players cant jump on top of them and "hide in the trees".

If you want to make the trees' collisions better, you can shave off the corners of the boxes as well - so long as the box has less faces than the tree does, it'll still provide considerable optimization.

This should drastically reduce the clipnode count - which is important at this point, as I'm worried you'll hit the maximum soon, due to that ambitious terrain arrangement. You can always use an alternate clip type to avoid this error, but each alternate clip type has potential draw backs of its own.

Also really liking J-M's idea of a imposing teleporter to some dungeon of sorts underground , no idea how to do these )

Teleporters are easy. Make a brush entity "trigger_teleport" and give it a target property (eg. "to_dungeon"). Click the entity tool, go to your dungeon entrance, and click on the ground on the point where you wish the player to arrive. Make that new point entity "info_teleport_destination", and give it a targetname matching that of the target property you defined on the trigger_teleport (eg. "to_dungeon"). You can change the angles of the info_teleport_destination to control which way the player will be facing when he arrives. (note that "targetname" appears as "name" if you have the Smart Edit on).

You can use a fancy func_illusionary or env_sprite to mark the teleporter. Adding sound effects also optional. Don't get carried away though - no need to crash the server every time someone teleports. A simple rune texture marker or dais or such is usually enough.

You can find more detailed information on this in The TL;DR Mapping Tutorial by searching for " trigger_teleport ".

 

[littleaznboi]

Thothie could you explain the details of monster spawns and triggers? I've read your mapping tutorial but there's some things I don't get. I know you use AAATrigger brush and stuff but I don't get how to make it so that monsters spawn like a 2nd time after all of the are killed. Like on Lodagond-4 in the yellow crystal room, once the skeletons are defeated, they spawn again and again. I wanna know how to do stuff like that

 

[Thothie]

You can use the lives property of any monster to make it spawn multiple times. Setting lives to 0 will cause it to spawn infinitely (or at least until the msarea_mosnterspawn that generates it is deleted via a trigger_relay's killtarget). Use the delaylow and delayhigh properties to determine the time between spawns. Please, however, do not spawn anything bigger than basic vermin infintely, or at least not without a very long delay.

Note also that if you trigger an msarea_monsterspawn after all the creatures tied to it have been slain, they will spawn again.

 

[littleaznboi]

Don't worry, I won't be making any thing spawn infinitely on my maps.

 

[FER]

The mummies are finished model-wise, it just needs a script now (by thothie or another scripter)

might post some pictures tomorrow