I'm afraid areaportals don't work in multiplayer (or just occluders?). I'd really look at where you could put in walls or building structures to cut of visibility. The holes in the buildings are a good example for that. Put a wall right behind the hole, make sure it seals off the inside from the high poly parts of the inside completely. It even has to "overlap" a bit so vvis is absolutely sure it can't be seen form the outside which isn't always logical. Like this (replace stairs by debris, ramp, doorway ect):

[pre]
##############

1. 1. #
2. "stairs" #
3. 1. #
4. detail # *hole <---- can't see detail from here
5. 1. #

### ^ ########
| ^
way in |
blocking wall

#=wall
[/pre]

Thanks for your collection of suggestions and comments, reaper47.

About some areas being too big for their meager purpose: the main thing that comes to mind is the parking garage which is certainly going to be reduced in size or at least prevent the player from going very far into it.

Optimization is absolutely key right now. I've spent countless hours per NIGHT on optimization and trust me, I think you'd be hard pressed to find another map with so many performance-related optimizations. :smile: Quite literally every face that isn't seen is nodrawed, I spent a lot of time on that. Performance should honestly double by the time the final is out, cutting the area down both gameplaywise and "air space" wise (skybox "roof" should be lowered, and edges brought in some more). Thanks for your comment on the scaffolding - I had not looked at that in wireframe at all. I'll go check it out right now, after this.

Yes, polies can and will be cut from the destroyed building if necessary. When I began doing some destruction I did a lot of fine detailing on the crumbling walls/floors etc, and you might be able to tell that as I went on I got more and more coarse with the brushwork. I will go back and tweak some of the earlier work so that it's not so detailed. I've also set up fade scales for static props inside this building and others, because as you mentioned, vvis says you can always see into here, so it's important that whatever is in there is faded out when you're far off and as low-res as possible. Some func_areaportalwindows might be useful in a few places like this as well, and/or occluders. I'll look into these methods soon. I think the parking garage could benefit from an areaportalwindow for sure.

Looking forward to optimizing, shrinking and improving this over the next week or so. Thanks a lot again for all your thoughts. :smile:

Alright, I had a quick look and liked what I see. But I'm fully convinced now that the map would benefit from the cuttings you mentioned. Some areas seem to be added only to connect parts of the map and they're too big and prominent for only this purpose. This also includes some indoor corridors.

Except for that my only other complaint is optimization. The fireladders are... pure polygon horrors. Look at them with "mat_wireframe 1" and you'll see almost a solid pink color because there are so many triangles! Make the poles plain rectangles, consider replacing the stairs by ramps (no matter how realistic this would be). Try to recreate the construction with simpler polygons with a masked (transparent) texture rather than building every part with a seperate brush.

The destroyed buildings need some optimization, too. You could cut the polygons by half while keeping the general look and feel. Also put a wall behind every part that's high poly and connected to the middle area. The underground parking lot for example, is always rendered completely. Even if I can hardly make it out and only see the hole in the floor. Turn mat_wireframe on and look at it from the treehouse area. You'll see the whole undergorund part rendered. Put a wall in the underground section between the parking lot and the hole to block it off from the outside more. The building with a hole in the first floor lets vvis see inside from the whole map also. Make sure to block the inside there too!

HL2 doesn't like brush polygons. The prop models don't matter but ideally if you turn mat_wireframe on, you should see a rather simple structure of pink (brush) polygons. You should able to make out every single polygon easily.

Optimization should be your next priority and if you do it smart, I think the layout will also benefit from the simpler structure.

Oh, did I mention I love the lighting? :biggrin:

Cool, thanks.. it's already undergoing a huge revamp though, keep that in mind. :smile:

I'm afraid the playtest was about 4 am at my place, I would have joined otherwise. I'll download the map and look at it, though.

I haven't much to say to these last few comments except you're right. :smile: Kind of back on topic for a moment:

The playtest lasted maybe an hour and a half, with several server crashes at random points. :smile: 5 players were present throughout and I had a lot of fun. Finger joined us and gave me his thoughts. The one that really motivated me was that the map was just needlessly large, for two reasons: performance, if I shrink the map I can certainly improve that and get more details; and gameplay.

I've been working on this tonight. I shrunk the parking lot to about half its original size and moved the building with the restaurant/cafe over to match (so now the two front doors of that building are exactly inline with the center of the road leading up the hill. I tossed the alleyway area and am currently trying to come up with a way to cut this area off right along the street, preferably blocking plenty of visibility. So far I've tried (roughly):

• Combine fences (tall metal barriers with shields on top).
• A pileup of three or four combine trains.
• A crashed combine helicopter.
• A crashed, large pickup truck.

None work right. Anybody have any ideas? The annoying thing about this is that you can see down the road from the rooftop of the far-off building and so visibility blocking is important but not exactly necessary.

thinks, frustrated

[edit]

How about this.. the road ENDS right after the destroyed building and splits off in two directions (90-degree angles off the main road the map follows). This allows major visibility blocking (a building right at the end of the road) and an easy way to "end" the map down here (even some simple concrete barriers work).

I see. Well so much for the texture magic. x(
arent the trees taking a lot of polygones?
like if you remove one of the three trees you
might be able to use the saved polygones on
details? Im just guessing - I have no clue of
the HL2 engine yet.. no yet!! xD

Source engine is leaps and bounds in compairson when it comes to "abilities". In most situations models are prefered since they are less complex for the engine to deal with. Something else I think I should point out right now, in case you don't already know ... R_Speeds are nonsense now. There's a showbudget command that is much more specific and helpful.

Take a look around on the valve wiki, it'll get you very comfortable with 'source'.

Kampy, those trees will be models. The HL2 engine can handle a lot more
detail in the form of "props", which can be static or
moveable/responsive to the physics engine. If anything, the scene could
probably use a few more props, pieces of rubbish scattered around and
so on.

:smile:

I see. Well so much for the texture magic. x(
arent the trees taking a lot of polygones?
like if you remove one of the three trees you
might be able to use the saved polygones on
details? Im just guessing - I have no clue of
the HL2 engine yet.. no yet!! xD

K, a friend is hosting this so don't expect the ping to be great.. or maybe.. if you live in Utah. :smile:

Server: 208.110.158.136
No password..

Will be up in a few minutes. Hope to see anyone there. :smile: