New Compiler

Just recnetly one of my friends (don't believe him much) told me that they have a set of new compiler programs. And whats so special about these things are that they can compile for any game (UT, HL2, HL1, castle wolfinstein, War Craft). And then he told me that Valve is using them for HL2. Now I looked around and found nothing on the net, so I decided to ask the gaming community first, before I believe him.

I havent heard anything, but then again, I never do

HL2? They making a sequel to Half-Life????!?!?!?

azelito said:
HL2? They making a sequel to Half-Life????!?!?!?

there are............ well ment to be Duke nukem forever will come out first :razz:

um, I kinda doubt this is true. UT's stuff is integrated nicely into the editor and takes about 5 seconds to compile ('build').

hey, those guys are making fun of HL2, GET THEM! :biggrin:

i aint making fun off HL2 i am just saying they have taken about 5 and a half years insted of the 5 they promised us.

BASTARDS, THE LOT OF THEM

:biggrin:

If there's one thing good about UED, it's the compile times.

hehe considering that you got at least 3 COMPLETELY different engines, theres a possibility that he was bsing you =P

valve uses their own compiling programs on HL2.. i.e. vbsp, vrad. trust me on this

Unless the compilers were sent what you're compiling for this wouldn't work, ever.

It's just because the engines do different things so you couldn't possibly make a general compiler (Try taking a quake level and playing it in unreal . . . doesn't work lol), and if you did it would be so inefticiant that it would be best not to use it.

The only way this would work well is if the compiers were sent in what you were mapping for at the time. So they could generate accordingly.

Cassius said:
If there's one thing good about UED, it's the compile times.

but its also its biggest downside with unrealED, no map is sacred, you can load it and edit anyones.. :sad:

the good side is, it uses the engine, you are actually creating the map almost as you build it. as i understand it, its not really compiling, but an exaggeratedly long and thorough save..

Lets just say my friend is a complete moron, I can remember when I was talking about how monty python made the rabbit "jump" and "attack" the knights, I say they used a string to do it (I dont actually know, it was a joke about how low of a budget they had) and he said no they used a spring to throw it, and then he added he saw it on "The Making of: Monty Python And The Quest For The Holy grail"

Unreal and Half-Life are two different engines, using two different interpretations of "3d space", at least mapping-wise (HL + Quake engines are CSG, Unreal is reverse-CSG). And with Warcraft 3, you don't even need to compile the maps. Bleh. :smile:

That's not exactly a correct interpretation on how 3D space is represented in mapping. They're actually the same, space subtracted from a void. The method of how to do this different though. When the map is creating the initial node in the tree and is doing all the CSG operations(removing geometry that can't be seen because it's either outside the hull of the map or hidden by other pieces of geometry that share the same plane), the map would resemble what it would look like in Unreal Ed. The difference is, UED does the CSG during "run-time" where as QEngine Editors do it at compile time. One gives you less build times(UED), the other gives you more flexibility to use the editor for other engines. The .map format is not specific to any engine, so all you have to do in order to use it for another engine is simply reconstruct the geometry. Basically it's the Game Industry Age Old Fight Between Performance and Flexibility.

The difference is subtractive geometry is a useless hassle.

Cassius said:
The difference is subtractive geometry is a useless hassle.

so is having to hunt town "leaks"

Don't know about you Jinx, but I got over my 'leaking' phase a few years back...

I never got over it. I'm hunting down some bastard leak as we speak, and it's one of those caused by the fact that all of the brushes which have been vertex manipulated diagonally are desperately trying to fit together, and failing.

I don't think you can actually get totally past your leak phase, I think you can just get fewer leaks...or possibly I'm a total noob.

Meh.

Sometimes I get leaks... but it usually doesnt take long to fix (pointfile!)

Subtractive editors were sent to Earth aeons ago, as punishment from the mapping gods. For centuries they pillaged the lands, robbing mappers of their time, forcing them to spend days just setting out the basic layout of the map. Then, a great hero rose up against the evils of reverse-CSG. There were legends of a new editor, one where you could make complex geometric structures in mere minutes! The editor, however was hidden in the faraway lands to the east. The hero, however, had no fear. He told the king he planned to go and get this editor, known as the "Golden Worldcraft". The king provided him with a vessel, the Argo...

Anyway, the guy gets WC and makes uber-maps. :razz:

Oh yeah, warcraft is totally different to all FPS engines as far as map format is concerned. Your friend is full of s**t.

Jinx said:

Cassius said:
The difference is subtractive geometry is a useless hassle.

so is having to hunt town "leaks"

a whole town full huh jinxy?

seriously tho, and don't quote me on this yet, but i think "leaks" are not possible with HL2.

i can experiment a bit if i must, but since i am not in the practice of creating them i ham unsure, but i do know, when you clip outside a map, there is now HOM.... so maybe that means no leaks too..

sde said:
I never got over it. I'm hunting down some bastard leak as we speak, and it's one of those caused by the fact that all of the brushes which have been vertex manipulated diagonally are desperately trying to fit together, and failing.

I don't think you can actually get totally past your leak phase, I think you can just get fewer leaks...or possibly I'm a total noob.

Meh.

as a last resort only. use a block of skybrush and cram it into the holes.

to my knowlede, its one of the few brushes that wont drive up r_speeds, wont create leaks, can be overlapped, and doesnt need to be a func_ wall to do so...

Well I know I continued to get occasional leaks right up until I stopped mapping.

Gollum said:
Well I know I continued to get occasional leaks right up until I stopped mapping.

gollum maps = every angle known to man = leaks possible

orph maps = all dull/boring 90* angles = possiblilty of leaks .00000001 percent

go figure :biggrin:

Gollum said:
Well I know I continued to get occasional leaks right up until I stopped mapping.

Thats probably why I never get leaks.

Gav said:

Gollum said:
Well I know I continued to get occasional leaks right up until I stopped mapping.

Thats probably why I never get leaks.

gav, you cannot STOP mapping, if you never BEGAN to

I'll have you know it was my Computer that loaded Worldcraft for the first time for Tom....me and him together tried to decipher how it worked!

if loading WC onto ones pc makes them a mapper, then i'm loading Bach and becoming a pianist tonight :smile:

True it doesn't make me a mapper, but I did start to use it, which meant I started to become a mapper, and in my entire period as a mapper I suffered no leaks, and have yet to suffer from any :razz:

Surely loading Bach and calling yourself a pianist would be like loading a map and calling yourself a mapper? Perhaps starting to learn the piano would make you a pianist... :biggrin:

point taken... i do however know how to play "chopsticks" on the keyboard .. perhaps that qualifies :smile:

*cough*Hoax*cough*

Warcraft maps don't need compiling foo :mrT:

Orpheus said:
seriously tho, and don't quote me on this yet, but i think "leaks" are not possible with HL2.

i can experiment a bit if i must, but since i am not in the practice of creating them i ham unsure, but i do know, when you clip outside a map, there is now HOM.... so maybe that means no leaks too..

There's no HOM anymore because now we have the processing power to clear the color buffer during run time. Basically it's running gl_clear 1 or equivalent every frame now. Back in the early days, since the level was completely contained you could squeeze out a few extra frames by not clearing this buffer since you wouldn't get any error(or at least not much) as long as you were inside the map. So now for each frame, they wipe the entire buffer to one color, then start rasterizing the 3D geometry to 2D geometry on the buffer. You could theortically still not clear the buffer today, but you just might get some rendering artifacts.

all thats fine and dandy edge, and i admit, somewhat over my noggin..

the point is, when you clip outside, its as in Unreal2, you see all the skybox, in spite of the fact that you may only have sky on the roof of one side.

if thats buffer action, its good by me.

Basically think of it like clearing the canvas before you paint your picture, and you use the same canvas for every picture. The old days, you didn't clean the canvas because the computer could accurately replace the colors. The errors usually happen when your painting doesn't use the whole canvas, thus you see part of what you drew before, and that just gets copied onto the new picture.

Orph flatlines

uhhhhh....hooookayyy

. . . Damn edge with your graphical edumacation . . . lol.

Oh well, I suppose me reading what you have to say in the forums is kinda like you paying for me to go to that particular lecture you learned it in :biggrin:

So, uh . . . thanks lol.

So you can't paint huh...Know anything about empty soda cans?... Not sure if I can come up with an analogy, but I'd like to find someone who has knowledge about the inner workings of empty soda cans...

Crono said:
. . . Damn edge with your graphical edumacation . . . lol.

Oh well, I suppose me reading what you have to say in the forums is kinda like you paying for me to go to that particular lecture you learned it in :biggrin:

So, uh . . . thanks lol.

Actually, never had a lecture on it, just did some research on OpenGL.

hmm, any suggestions for sites or books? I'm leaning towards GL programming, but my damn course work is low level crap (not too low level, but low enough that you don't need a mouse lol).

Nonetheless, thanks lol. Although the ideas behind graphical programming seem very simple compared to some of the crap I've had to learn recently :smile:

Well there's some great sites, www.gametutorials.com and http://nehe.gamedev.net/. Also the OpenGL SuperBible 3rd Edition is supposed to be out in May, the 2nd Edition is a bit old.

Hmmm . . .I already knew about both of those sites lol.

I didn't really . . . like some of their methods. (getline . . . ew)

Anyway, I'll keep a look out for that book then. (it would kick major ass if Prata wrote one . . . too bad he only writes of basic C++ and some datastructure operations). I think there's also an openGL class somewhere at my school, but I look and look and look and it can't be found lol. Anyway, thanks in either case.