Caulk structural??

[SSF-Sage]

So does this mean it makes the bsb more complex? If I make the caulked brush detail, what is the difference? Does this make another leafnode? Would it be better to use “detailed” caulk for nodraw and solid, so it wouldn’t make splits. I have a terrain with about 16000 (?) caulked planes! Does this make this many splits more??? Plz help me since I am new to knowing about the compiling stuff. I think I’m just worrying for nothing since everyone recommends to use caulk! With the nickname even third map with single bsp… 4th will have atleast vis, to try to block everything being drawn. That’s about all I know about compiling. Trying to learn hintting etc. Plz any advices are welcome. Hope you will understand.

[_UBC_McNite]

Leafnodes only get created by structural brushes. And its not relevant whether they are caulked or not.
Nonsolid brushes are always detail afaik, even when you make them structural, same with surfaceparm water.

The reason why you give surfaces that you cant see the caulk textures is that it possibly reduces the triscount. If you are doing very clean brushwork, its not much of a difference though. It can seriously reduce your compile time though, but that s not really important with the CPUs we have nowadays.

For a good tutorial on VIS blocking and using hint brushes, read this.

[Flippy]

I don’t know if im entirly right on this, but afaik, the practise of caulking is not done to reduce BSP splits, but merely to reduce tris count.

When you make a brush that has a normal texture on all faces, then, whenever this brush is inside the players view, the engine WILL draw ALL the faces, even those that might be inside other brushes or up against other brushes.
Imagine a box sitting on the ground in the corner of a wall for example.
The bottom face, and two side faces, will NEVER be seen by the player because there are walls. BUT (if you textured them normally) the faces WILL be drawn by the game engine.

If you caulk those faces on the other hand, the engine will NOT (never) draw them. This means the engine has to draw 3 faces (6 triangles (tris) i think) less.

While 6 tris are a tiny amount, imagine what the count would be in a terrain for example, where all faces are textured… The resulting rise in tris will be huge and will probably affect the performance of the map alot.

I always think it’s good practise to caulk all sides of all brushes that you are sure will never be seen. As long as you’re sure that they can never be seen there can be no harm to this and probably won’t take much time to do either.

EDIT
A good tip would be to make a test map with two of the same rooms. One where you caulk faces that cannot be seen and one where you don’t.
Then run around in these rooms with “r_showtris 2” (which will show you all tris drawn by the game). You will be able to see the effects quite nicely then.

[SSF-Sage]

Thx. Flippy I know that stuff. So caulked planes will not make a bsp split, although it’s structural or even the whole brush is structrural? I meant I don’t know about compiling what does these all settings does, though know just a littlebit of vis and light. I will read that tutorial with better time. I just quickly scanned it trough. And actually theres about 5x16000++++ caulked planes to be more accurate. I did a huge mistake and make a nice terrain with too small brushes. I needed to delete all possible brushes from it (those that couldn’t been seen). And merge the flat parts. And I have made a lot of more stuff to it, so it’s too late to change it. Well I learned something. It’s just playable if it won’t load rest of the (coming) map (can get about 150-250 fps on it, SUX :P).

edit-

"Leafnodes only get created by structural brushes. And its not relevant whether they are caulked or not. "

This will give me a peace of mind, thank you.

[_UBC_McNite]

When you make a brush that has a normal texture on all faces, then, whenever this brush is inside the players view, the engine WILL draw ALL the faces, even those that might be inside other brushes or up against other brushes.

When brush faces are exactly macting other faces its not relevant whether they r caulked or not. They will not get drawn. You can easily test this: have a terrain of proper texturing, and one where you texture the whole brushes. The surfaces that have an exact match on them show no tris when using any r_showtris.

While 6 tris are a tiny amount, imagine what the count would be in a terrain for example, where all faces are textured… The resulting rise in tris will be huge and will probably affect the performance of the map alot.

For TheRiver II Redux I spent some time on optimizing my brushwork. While I was able to reduce the tris-count noticeably, it didnt really up the FPS. There are several other factors that take effect on the gameperformance (BSP-tree, collision calculation etc). All in all, and with regard to the really strong CPUs the computers have nowadays, I would not worry at all about tris-count unless you really do something wrong. Everything that is not more than 30.000 - 35.000 tris is ok imo.
And you can optimize your performance a lot better wiht a good VIS blocking.