Visability

I wonder if anyone can help.

I'm working on a CS map. Although fairly complex it's basically 3
largish hangers with multiple connecting corridors. Although nowhere
near complete I'm using cl_showfps & mat_wireframe to identify any
hotspots, with a view to getting rid of them (although the map was
built with such things in mind).

The problem is that, although there are not even remotely any lines of
view, and all connecting corridors switch sufficiently to block the
views, at least one hanger other than the one you are in is always
being drawn when you are in any of them. In one particular hanger you
can see both others. Things improve when you are actually in the
corridors.

I've tried using both Hints & Area Portals without success,
although this may be down to inexperience (I can use them, and I don't
get any 'portal leaks', they just don't stop the drawing when I would
expect them to.).

Gratefull for any suggestions on how to procede.

Thanks,

CJ

If hints dont work, youre pretty much out of luck, as far as I know. Areaportals are only for switching visibility on and off, for example a door would trigger an areaportal so whatevers behind it is visible if the door is open, but not if its closed. At lest, thats my understanding of it.

Youll probably have to put far more hint brushes in your map than youll expect. It also cant hurt to optimise your geometry (look for anywhere there is excessive face splitting in mat_wireframe and try and minimise this). Hope that helps.

---

"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

turn on cl_visleaf... or is is drawleaf, something like that.
this will show you a red box that indcates the vis leaf your in.
VIS will draw lines from every point in that box and will draw any
leafs it can see.

so if you have a high wall with objects on the other side and your VIS
leaf is able to see over the wall it will draw the other side. So
even though there is no direct line of sight possible it will still
think there is. A hint brush at the top line of the wall will fix
this problem.

So i'm going to guess that maybe you have high windows in the
hanger? even if the player cant see out of those windows vis will
look through them.

post some screens of problem areas if this doesn't help.

mat_leafvis i think

a note about areaportals - even an always open areaportal will affect
things. Its basically the equivalent of a normal portal in a
portal based 3D engine. It culls on a per vis-leaf and per-model
basis. IE:

You put an always open areaportal in a doorway with no door. Now
when the engine draws the level, any vis leafs that you could see
before that are completely hidden behind the wall will be culled.
You can sort of think of it as the walls are like occluders except for
vis leafs.

Then the engine steps through all the models and for each determines
whether or not its visible through the areaportal and will draw it or
not draw it.

So if the size of your vis leafs are very large, it won't cull any
extra world gemoetry, just models. Now with a large hangar, thats
probably exactly the problem.

---

To get something to work, sometimes you just have to beat your head against the wall longer; the skin grows back, but the brick doesn't.

Source hates soup!

My eyes hurt from driving to long so I am not gonna read this whole thread. However, I will ask questions and if they were covered already, just ignore this post.

Are you sure that the command you are using is giving you the information you seek? I mean, are you sure that everything is being drawn by the engine?

Some commands show the entire map no matter what, and some commands only show whats being drawn at the moment.

Also, vis blocking always works, if you have tried this and failed, then you obviously built the map incorrectly and the simple fact is the area you have is to complex or chaotic enough to cause low FPS. Bottom line, visblocking works, you just need to make a map that will give you low FPS.

/ 2 cents

---

The best things in life, aren't things.