AntiPortal and Skip......... possible uses ???

(omnix32) #1 
Ok, made a flat large map with alot of tree's about 40 of em. noticed that antiportal worked in blocking the tree's (and everything else until steping through the portal.)
   Is this still bad mapping or can these be used to keep outside trees and terrain from being drawn once inside a building. I read some post from quake2 on this. There are alot of flat maps with horrible r_speed, a product of bad level design, but Are these now somewhat fixable. thanx for any info.
(demoneye) #2

Am I missing something - surely this is can be done with hint brushes instead?

DeMoNeye

(omnix32) #3 
 ummmmmm, not on flat open terrain maps with alot of trees for example. No matter where you attempt to place the hint in an outdoor map you going to get trees showing up in tris. Alot of maps that are out there play bad because there flat open terrain. 

  My thought was that skip or antiportal might be usefull in some way. I know what antiportal does but I could not get skip on the side of a hint brush to do much anything. Just need a little claification on these.

thanx for the response.

(demoneye) #4

I thought a skip brush has the opposite effect of a hint brush, it stops the vis being broken.

DeMoNeye

(omnix32) #5

Ya, I was just wondering if it was possible to fix those open flat maps people love to make so much. I have played with both. I just thought there might be a way to speed up some maps in those slow places. thanx for the input.

(Raven) #6

Antiportals work really well in blocking vis in terrain maps. They are tricky sometimes, but as long as you follow the rules they can be very useful.

  1. You cannot have an antiportal face showing or it will HOM on you, which means you should bury the antiportal faces inside the terrain.

  2. You cannot have an antiportal face on the same plane as a structural brush. This will cause your map to leak. So just don’t line up the antiportal faces to structural geometry.

  3. They are not as optimized as Unreal Tourney 2003 portals, meaning you cannot drag an antiportal face halfway across the map and expect it to block vis. You have to create a true seal with the antiportal in order for it to work properly.

I am currently using them on several terrain maps and they work incredibly well :wink:

(KoS) #7

Very interesting!
Will you supply some picture or show me how you exacly place them in the map?

(Raven) #8

I have a whole document that I wrote up for the other designers at work. I will have to see if I can publicly display it.

(KoS) #9

Perfect!

Can’t wait

(omnix32) #10 
 Ok, now thats the kind of response I was hoping for. Showing an example of placement would be awsome.
(demoneye) #11

I’d love to be able to block my terrain - see some pictures on http://www.demoneye.games-punk.com - would it work on maps where you have a series of small valleys?

I’ve tired blocking with hint, but with no luck.

DeMoNeye

(Emon) #12

What if you made your terrain, then cloned it, textured it with antiportal and moved it a few units under the old terrain?

(omnix32) #13 
I would think that the other portals would still be able to see into it. I could get the effect of blocking it off, but had to take it off the map. just trying to block certain places outside did not work as the other leafnods had portals looking over it.
 Can't wait to see how to use it effectivly
(Wils) #14

You’d end up with a 30mb .bsp with a vis data size in the region of a couple of million, Emon :smile:

(Emon) #15

Oooh… that hadn’t occured to me! :eek:

Antiportal just blocks vis, right? So you can put it under terrain or behind walls and stuff to block stuff that shouldn’t be drawn? I know sometimes in indoor areas the vis blocking doesn’t work right, at least doesn’t work how I want it to. That’s what it’s for, right?

What about, if you’re using GenSurf or EasyGen, make a duplicate of the terrain but very, very low poly and making that antiportal?

(Raven) #16

I will see what I can do about getting the documentation up in one form or another next week sometime :smile:

(omnix32) #17 
  You folks at Raven rock. Please find time to do this and post a nice link.
Thanx for all the input everyone to my post.
(Emon) #18

While you’re at it, tell James to reply to my e-mail! :wink:

(demonspawn) #19

Raven, I know your a busy guy, but I’ve reached the point of no return with trying to get me R_speeds to a reasonable level, (14 at their worst).
I am very interested in you antiportal document as I believe that it will help me tame some of the issues that I’m having. If all else fails i’ll have to do some serious cutting to get to a more reasonible r_speed level. Hope you can help me, more than you already have.

Tks Demonspawn :drink: