uhm...tl armature...the lamp in screenshot 1, with the red light n stuff, mostly used to light up large spaces, generates very little heat, takes 30% less energy against a 20000 hour life span, I believe.

the game calls em Fluorescent lights.

On the topic of the multi-brush func_details - pretty sure that if you can see part of it, all of it gets rendered. Easy enough thing to test to be sure though :smile:

tl armature? What do you mean?

And.. a 2-day vvis? That's absolutely the highest I've ever heard, you need to work on optimization because it's crucial. I once had around 7 hours and just adding one brush brought it down to around 1 and a half hours.. after a few hours of work I got vvis down to 1 minute and 30 seconds. This is on a partially-outdoor-partially-indoor map so it's not exactly enclosed spaces. Be very gratuitous with func_detail and glview will help you a lot. Make sure many-sided brushes are func_detailed, and even smaller ones that don't block much visibility at all.

Why do streetlights have four lights, am I missing something? In real life the streetlamp wouldn't be lit all-round like that. One light_spot shining down will light it up plenty just how it should be. Also it sounds like maybe you don't have a light_environment with some ambient lighting set up which is pretty important for outdoor maps and provides lighting all around which is important so you don't have to manually light every single area and stuff.

Even static lights aren't 100% "performance impact free". Dynamic ones will really hurt performance but even static ones have to be accounted for, as far as lighting props and the viewmodel. One hour isn't too bad, I had around that at one point and optimized it down to about 20 minutes.

As far as the clip being "not noticeable unless you look for it" - see, that's what I mean by the clipping being pointless. It doesn't look like the buildings are obscured by the fog entirely and so if they're clipped off you'll be able to tell. If you can't really tell then very little is being clipped and it's pointless, like gaining 1FPS for a huge visual quality degradation of seeing these missing polygons. Hard to tell without a build to check out, I'd be glad to tell you what I think as soon as one is available.

The bus stops look good, anything that isn't func_breakable_surf should be func_detailed as it sounds you have done already. func_breakable_surfs should not have a noticeable performance difference in the least (as in, deleting one model from the map would create a larger difference).

As for your last func_detail question, that's a good one I wonder about myself.. I'm pretty sure it's still broken down visibilitywise into all the seperate brushes (e.g. same effect as func_detailing all the brushes individually, just "wrapped" into one entity).

The red light is indeed a bit freaky. Its coming from the tl armature, or at least it's supposed to look like that. Also note that these screenshots are from non-vis compiles, since running vis on this map will require two days or something as it seems now. I am currently running a full vis compile on the map, it's been working from 01:00 last night up to this time and still not finished.

All the maps coming from tl lights are single lights. Then there are the streetlights, the high lamp posts are indeed models and mostly use 1 light_spot but the light posts shown in screen 2 and 3 are brush-bases, since the game didn't offer such a lamp post model...The round ones have 4 lights, 1 on each side, this is really needed to light both the lamp post and huge surround areas correctly, such as visible in screen 2. Removing one would result in a badly lit lampost side, making the bright yellow appear not-so-bright and less light in the area. The flat lampposts (screen 2) use 1 light.

There are a lot of lights in this map because there are lots of lights around the place where I live, where the map is based on. I am personally very happy with that since thataway I could make the map night style without having to worry where to place lights - the layout was already predefined....while placing them in the map I noticed that they have really thought about where to place those lights, since the map was lighted just as it would have been in real life and everything that needs to be lit up is lightened up.

All the lights I used are non-dynamic, thus free on the in-game engine but not on the vrad process :razz: that currently takes about one hour to complete in fast bounce2 noextra mode...but it's worth it.

When I first put the fog in I was indeed blasted away by it's white assed uglyness. I set it to a very dark gray right after that and that is what these screenshots were made with. The fog start is 1536, fog end is 5120 and fog zclip is 6144 so the clip is not really noticeable unless you ofcourse start looking for it. I will check if a blue fog looks better, if it does it goes and in each case you are thanked for your comment, I find the information given here very usefull and everybody is happy to help :smile: so this maps gets better every time.

And why would the forced clip not increase performance? The outside area is a bit high on models and it takes two minutes to walk from one side to the other side of the map, so something has to give. I have started to use model fade distances too, but they only seem to be usefull inside or on edges of the map, everything in the middle has to be visible most of the time since thats how far you can look if you're standing in some corner of the map. When one stands in the middle of the map the whole enviroment is visible, you can see to both edges if you turn around.

The bus stops are not models. I made them using brushes and func_breakable_surfs and converted the steel structure & roofs to func_detail.
All the curved geometry that lies on the road in my map is func_detailed, thataway I saved a hell of a lot on polycounts outside.

By the way, I was wondering, do func_breakable_surfs take more power & entdata then func_breakables?

And how about the visibility of func_details...if you would turn one big piece of geometry thats not entirely visible from all points into a func_detail, would it be entirely drawn even when you look at a small part of it?

Hey CrazyPunk,

Just looking at these Snarkpit screenshots and had a few thoughts.

First screen: The invisible red light is weird. Where is it coming from? Why is it just here? This area looks pretty nice. The fireplace exhaust stands out a lot.

Second screen: Are those brush based streetlights? You do know HL2 comes with a model for a nice looking one and should be even less performance intensive than brushes, right? I like the lighting in this area.

Third screen: Okay, I'd say, toss that fog, or make some that actually seams with the skybox. It happens a lot where people add this white fog to their map with a dark sky and so you just see these white outlines against the sky. It looks unprofessional, so I'd suggest changing the fog color to like a dark blue that fits the sky or just not have it. I like the bus stops, are those stock models or brushes?

As far as your comment - you say you set the fog clip to 6944 units. You should only set this if the fog will obscure the clipping.. considering the huge distance that is, it will really not help performance at all and it'll just look ugly to see buildings cut off for no reason, so I strongly suggest disabling that.

Also - 294 lights? How? That's, in my experience, quite excessive and will probably hurt performance, at least a little bit. DM_residential has only around 80 now and I've really gone pretty overboard with illumination in the halls and stuff (3 lights per wall fixture, 3 lights per overhead flourescent light, etc). That's a huge number and I'm really wondering how you ended up with so many. I suggest you stick with "real life illumination", that is only place lights where there are light sources (don't light up hallways subtly with a bunch of dark lights, instead try a light fixture) etc. Either way that's a high-ass number.

Shaping up, though. :smile:

Allright.

The map is rocking balls now. It took me four long days to get the skybox and the lightning, fog and night effects right but it's nearly done now. At his point I got 294 vrad lights, compiling takes a bit long but it's worth it! I set the fog to clip at 6144 units, far enough to make the clipping not very apparant unless you really want to see it ofcourse. I've also been experimenting with model fade distances and am having an idea on how to use that feature in this map.

I need to make some improvements on texturing, aligning stuff and so on. Also, I am going to final-detail the areas and improve geometry where neccesery.

All in all, the map is nearing bug-test phase. I need some people to check the map for bugs for a while, I assume people here would be interested? :wink:

I also uploaded a bunch of new screenshots on both my space and here. Enjoy!

Some hot news here.

I managed to enclose the map perimiter with sky and structure now and I tested it.

First off, the bsp process goes smooth. There seem to be no leaks in my map, which I am really happy about considering its size. There are a bunch of findportalside errors but they are just caused by the huge brushes I used here and there for the time being. I'll have them out in a jiffy :razz:

Thus for the time being I will mainly improve things in the inside of the map, curing the bugs, setting up the cubemaps, detailling, messing with the lightning etc.

Still can't decide weither to make it a daylight map or a nightime map. Altough the map looks cool in daylight, it also is big, and I am not sure how this might affect the performance on network games. Nighttime would mean I have to put a lot of additional lightning in the map, but nighttime light effects still look cool and a lessened visibility will increase performance anyhow.

After some time fiddling with one particular corner of the map, I've come to the point of being able to seek for leakage and building a skybox within the next two days.

I uploaded one measly screenshot to my space...well...measly...it shows the work I've done today, and it looks good :wink:

For your pleasure I've also updated the three screenshots that have been forever on the snark.

People started changing the layout of stuff in the storage again...not a bad progress this time, considering they're building a wall now. I've pre-built the wall in the editor already but I am afraid the hanging matresses will be gone after this little home improvement. Oh well, at least it leaves me with another great vis blocker :wink:

I got some news for you concerning this map.

First of all, I've been putting on some new screenshots on my space.

Since google maps decided to finally put better images of the Netherlands online, I was able to make a really neat overview of my map. Go check it out. It rocks.

Second of all, I didn't made that much progress with the map lately, I am nearing the full "enclosure" of my map now so I can finally get rid of that huge block skybox then and save a hellofalot free faces & stuff.

Allright...I got some news on the progress of the map:

First of all, I put 5 new screenshots on that slow msn space of mine...oh wait, it's "Windows Live Spaces" nowadays, right?

I've done some major func_detailling today. There was a raised "sidewalk" block that had many curves. I made one big func_detail of that bastard and my map ran quite smooth again.

My pc could not even run the single player of halflife 2 without heavy stuttering, so whenever I just have a very minor stutter with a big unvised map like this, I'm considering myself just happy that it even actually runs.

There was a minor bug somewhere in the windows in the living compartement that made the map crash upon loading. I tracked them down to the last 6 brushes that could potentionally be the erronic brush. Imagine my case of cold sweat when it just suddenly refused to run...good thing I've found a quick way to bugtrack.

There was going to be a construction yard visible in the map. I decided to not do that at all, instead I made a wooden wall around the perimeter and am going to put the construction yard inside a future skybox.

The skybox is also going to contain some random buildings that'll make the place look more correct and the row of houses on the other side of the street next to the trainstation. The street was supposed to be a walkable area too but with performance in mind, I decided to cut that idea.

Did a big job on retexturing and modifying buildings. I nearly am finished with the little bus station office and the trainstation complex has come a long way too. I moved a particular player block decoy to the other side of the level and modified the existing ones.
Where the train rides off into the distance would normally be a long road with more houses. I decided to cap the level where the trainstation parking lot ends. I made a nice decoy building and changed a potentional leak situation.

There was a minor issue with not having cubemaps for a while, turned out I deleted them during my error-tracking process. After throwing a quick and dirty env_cubemap in the middle of the map the problem was solved.

There is some issue with a "WorldTwoTextureBlend on non-displacement surface" but I got the co?rdinates n stuff from the console so I am going to track that one down tommorow.