Ah, I forgot/didn't consider railings. I didn't remember seeing them in the reference picture I used, but looking back, they are there. Hmm. I'll see how they fit in, maybe; thanks for noticing.

@ parking garage: Yeah, something like this. I started roughing it out a bit earlier. A ramp down to an underground lot, and I'd like to connect it so that:

• Players can access the underground area through the corner building.
• Players can access the underground area through a hole/crater in the exterior parking lot.
• Players can go between underground and above-ground via the ramp.
• Players can go between underground and above-ground via stairs on one side or the other; maybe both.

Just an initial idea, I think it would be cool if you could have several ways of entering or exiting the area and using it to your advantage.

I've also got some techniques in mind for sprucing up some buildings, so prepare for possibly some screenshots of buildings with details soon. :smile:

A small ramp down to a large bay door type set up, with a little gaurdhouse/ticket booth type thing.

The fire escape looks pretty good. Not having railings on the sides is kinda weird, but I think with gameplay in mind omitting them was a good choice.

It's been a while, so here's a brief update.

Been working plenty on optimization lately, vacuum-sealing empty buildings, etc. Doing well enough now that I'll worry about it more later and start back on map design.

Replaced the ladder to the sniper spot in the destroyed building with a fire escape system. Here is a picture of what I've got.

Created some damage in the parking lot (a crater). Can't find a screenshot of it and I guess it's for the best since I don't really care for how it looks now.

In fact I'd like to come up with some way to integrate an underground parking garage area - a small one-level one - basically just the same size as the parking lot, underground, that people could go through. It'd be nice if I could tie something like that in with the corner building so you could go directly into the garage from the building, from the garage to the parking lot, etc. I just need to kind of come up with a way to integrate it (how do cars get in there? a ramp down from the parking lot maybe). Thoughts?

That's about all for now. :smile:

Yeah, reaper47 - I did put one across the map as low as possible (touching the roof of the hotel).

I also need to put some along the street maybe around 128 units high so that people on the street won't be considered able to see behind all the buildings and stuff.

I'm glad it helped. Looking at the screen I think one giant hintbrush in the top (sky area) of the map that touches the roofs exactly should help a lot. Not only for compile times but also fps load. Right now the vis leafs of each street can see each other.

Alright... for my fourth post in a row, I'd just like to mention that I've just done a test vvis-only compile and the verdict is 55 minutes and 1 second.

I'm just getting started... :biggrin: Excellent.

Alright, so "jesus!" (in a very deep loud "goddammit" voice), I found what caused the longass compile time..

There are two sets of stairs in the hotel which were set to block visibility up until last night. I decided to set them up to be func_detail and just seal around them with NODRAW so it would be a quicker compile and less leaves to deal with. Long story short, I didn't seal one off properly, and so you could see through it into this awful network of just.. leaves galore in this abyss inside the hollow hotel.

Fixed it even better than it should have worked the way I did it last night. I also basically completely remodeled the corner building interior to be uber-efficient as well as tweaked some leaves on the roof... and I also sealed off some building areas.. basically this next compile should compile quick and the ingame performance should be beyond what it's been in a long while.

Thank god for glview. :biggrin:

Just tested it in-game, it runs quite well in fact (45-50FPS looking down the street), basically nothing below 40 as far as I saw.

So I decided I should set up glview to see what the hell's going on.. and I got this.

I don't know how it should look, but that.. looks.. bad.

Gonna have a look at what Valve did for func_detail etc in some of their sdk VMF files (d1_trainstation_02 namely) and try glview there as well to see how many leaves they have.

Thanks for the heads up, reaper47.

Wow.. :eek:

Yeah, I've seen that page before (it's been a while though). I'll run through it again soon, thanks for the link.

I'm always extremely func_detail happy and so this comes as a surprise to me.. I really bet it has something to do with the hill and how I've put a large nodraw brush under it and func_detailed it.

I let vrad finish (final compile time: vvis 7h, vrad 30m) so I'm gonna go test it now... brb. Something is definitely askew..

vvis above half an hour is critical. 1 hour if it's a really big map. 2 hours if it's a 1:1 model of Manhattan. Forgetting to make some stairs a func detail or having other, complex, no-func_detail brush geometry can double or tripple compile times easily.

Do you know this optimisation tutorial?:

http://www.student.kun.nl/rvanhoorn/Optimization.htm

It covers pretty much everything.