* Leak in compile * Lighting still great and fps high

Hey, I couldn't really find a clear answer on this topic. As I'm sure some of you have noticed when compiling a map with a leak, the facelights are still run, so sometimes it's hard to notice whether or not you do have a leak if you just run the map while your in the washroom or what not.

Anyhow, the source of my leak was that I had accidently changed one of my outside walls into a func_detail. When I run the map the lighting is still amazing, the sun is redered, and the cubemaps seems to work perfectly.

What I am getting at here is, when I fixed that leak, it took my map several hours to compile (lovely portalflow) but I didn't notice any difference in lighting, and my FPS were way higher. So my question is,

Why should I be compiling without a leak, when I get a slower performance in gameplay and compiling when there isn't one? Is there some hidden thing that I'm not seeing here?

Thanks

-Sokrateas

Your post is inconsistant so I'm not too sure what you are getting at.
However, if you run your map with a leak, VIS won't run and so all of
your map will be rendered during gameplay, hitting in game performance
significantly. RAD will still run so you will have lighting, but it
will be direct lighting only - you won't get any light bounces which
help make a scene more realistic. In short, you always want your map to
be sealed.

You said it yourself: "and my FPS were way higher". Having a high FPS is a good thing! it means its running smoother. You must have thought it was bad to have a high framerate.

Simple mistake i suppose :smile:

Well yeah, he knows it's a good thing. What he's saying is that
why should he seal his map if the lighting is the same and the fps is
higher when he doesn't. But the answer is the lighting isn't quite the same
;-) Though if bouncing really isn't that important, probably the
best thing to do would be to seal the map and then not run vis...though
I can't really recommend that. At least run vis on -fast...

Yeah when I said High FPS I meant low. I'm no moron when it comes to this stuff. I'm serious about the FPS being higher when it is not sealed. I checked and compared in certain areas and they were higher leaked. I didn't notice about the bounce lights though, I'll have to check that again, because that would be a big difference... Thanks for the feedback guys.

If your map has a leak don't even release it, nobody will play it ever.

Er, right... :rolleyes:

Anyway. I don't see why the FPS are higher without VIS- are you using cl_showfps to display them? I think the indicator can sometimes be wrong after running buildcubemaps and requires a restart, and obviously it can be heavily influenced by memory- perhaps running VIS on your map somehow uses up system resources which aren't freed to HL2 when you play?

Certainly VIS should not take hours to run, and that's either indicative of you having a rubbish PC or that you're doing some horrible horrible things with your world geometry and need more func_details and the like around.

My suggestion: check this is actually true, by 'optimising' your map, then running a full compile and buildcubemaps, then restart Steam and load up your map. Compare this with the same but with a quick compile.

Well, I know that I'm not the best with my func_details. As far as my PC goes I'm running Athlon 64 3400+ and 1 gig of ram. I imagine that the func_detail stuff is really creaming my map. Would a large amount of glass also cause some of this lag? Because I'm running about 120 panes of glass in my map... Anyway, the map is running awesome in rotation without being sealed... I'm gonna go through and do the func_detail though, and see if there is a significant boost in performance.

Thanks for all the help guys. You're great.

-Sok

Sooo you still have a Leak:

Leak=Bad.......you dont need to close off your map, but then again none of us need to play such a crappy map.

Its not a question of sealing up your map, its a question of porfessionalism.

If you dont seal up your map, then I think your name will be branded
with the term "n00b". Because if there is a leak on a map and your
running it at high FPS, then it must be very crappy.

So I leave you with this: SEAL YOUR MAP! Its not that hard, just load
the point file, If you dont know how to do that, then check out the
leak tutorial.