This is a map of my home & a part of the surrounding enviroment, which is a central bus / train station with some parking lots here and there, and a lot of trees.
There is one main building, Spoorloos, where I live. It's a squatted storage space / office complex, where a foodbank, giveaway store and music sessions are hosted, as well as providing living space.
The train station lies directly next to Spoorloos. There is a trainyard on the other end of Spoorloos where trains are driven to to be repaired or to wait for departure the next day.
There is a train station complex on the station grounds, where people can lunch in a cafe, take a dump for 20 eurocents and wait in a hall when they're too much of a pussy to wait outside. There is a bike shop directly underneath this building.
Next to the train station complex and on the other side of the rail are parking lots for train passengers. On the other side of the rail is also a row of houses, all along the street.
In front of the train station complex is the bus station. This is the place from where you can go anywhere in this city. There is lots of lightning in this area, so even at night everything looks as if it was day, except with that nightly gloom over it, you know.
In front of the bus station is a big construction yard where they are currently working on a 10 floor office or something. Next to that construction yard is a big yellow appartement flat, with another parking lot in front of that.
Beside that parking lot, next to the trainyard on the other side of the perimeter, are the supermarket & snackbar and some houses.
Overall the map is pretty huge and still needs to be worked a lot on, but Spoorloos is hard on its way to become digital!
Discussion
Posted by CrazyPunk on
Fri Aug 18th 2006 at 12:39pm
[Author]
hmm, I tried it last night but some way it doesn't want to connect with level geometry...could this be because the skybox is parralax?
In that case I'll just have to built a smart skybox, as in, buildings in the skybox that are blocked from the lower part by a wall or something.
Yeah, you can do that. Pretty much any 3D skybox tutorial will tell you to scale down some reference geometry and build around that. In this case, scale down the road or sidewalks in question, and start to build houses right along there.
Posted by CrazyPunk on
Thu Aug 17th 2006 at 11:28pm
[Author]
Err lol....
I just reread my last comment and realized a stupid, stupid mistake...
"I do understand that it is not possible to walk around in the skybox geometry but thats exactly what I want."
What I meant to say with this is that I do not want players to walk around in the skybox geometry and also know that it's not possible anyways.
Posted by CrazyPunk on
Wed Aug 16th 2006 at 9:19pm
[Author]
the matresses are okay...they'll get "simplified" automaticly in DM anyway
the hanging matresses are all physics, all the standing ones 'xcept the ones around the entrance are static
Does anybody know if it is possible to make a skybox thats connected to the level in such way that the architecture lines up correctly? As in, making a building line up with a street that lies next to it, while in reality there is a sky brush next to that street?
I do understand that it is not possible to walk around in the skybox geometry but thats exactly what I want.
Posted by Mr.INSANE on
Wed Aug 16th 2006 at 9:01pm
those mattresses are probally part of the problem if all of them have physics turned on
Your map being big is no reason not to use cubemaps. Cubemaps will have only the tiniest of influences on performance (tiny as in, not noticeable whatsoever) provided you don't have tons of them packed around the level needlessly. Not sure what the issue you are having with that error is - you are using the "buildcubemaps" command once you launch the map in game right?
By using fog you could indeed help performance. You could tighten in the fade distance on props so that they stop being rendered after a certain distance, and the fog would hide the fact you were doing it. I think there's also an option to stop rendering ANYTHING after a certain distance, so even BSP brushes wouldn't get rendered. That said, fog isn't really the ideal answer to performance woes - if you are looking at needing fog, then its possible your performance issues stem from other issues and could be better addressed through other means.
Posted by CrazyPunk on
Wed Aug 16th 2006 at 10:25am
[Author]
The matresses in shot 2 are hanging from the roof, we have a whole wall of them because last winter was really cold and we needed something to enclose our acoustic session area...thus it's surrounded by matresses :razz:
And for the cubemaps....some way source keeps going bad on "cubemap used without rebuilding world" stuff, could be because I deleted the cubemaps yesterday in the bug tracking process (I found the source of the bug and am fixing it)
I might also consider not to use cubemaps at all for this map since it's rather...big. I know, I will miss all kinds of cool effects but sometimes one has to make sacrifices.
I was wondering...if I were to make the map play in a foggy night setting (dark and limited visibility outside ) could that increase the framerate a bit?
The map still runs pretty fast without vis & light performed but I realized the outside area is one big renderfest so I am looking for ways to keep performance to the max while making things still look good.
What's going on with all the matresses in shot #2?
Posted by CrazyPunk on
Tue Aug 15th 2006 at 3:53pm
[Author]
I didn't made much progress with the map, I picked it up again today after two weeks of rest or something... :razz:
there is a bug somewhere and I've nearly tracked it down, and I've also done some minor improvements, mostly grouping together the func_details where possible.
