Do the number of brushes have a major impact on framerate?

(MasterToke) #1

First off, I’m new and 95% of what I read here is way over my head… nevertheless, reading the threads here leaves me awestruck from the knowledge that abounds. I’m not worthy so please take pity on my noob soul :smiley:
I posted this question on another board and no one was able to answer it.

I know that I shouldn’t texture sides/parts of brushes that won’t be seen by the player(s), as the game will draw these textures regardless, thus using up additional system resources. With that said, I often find myself slicing a brush into several pieces just to keep a small portion “caulked” and not textured. For example…

Let’s say I have a large wall that I want to attach some light fixtures to (fixtures made from brushes). The fixtures are small. I could either attach the fixtures to the wall, sticking them right on top the texture of the wall OR I can cut the wall up into several brushes so that I can caulk behind the fixtures. If I turn one brush into 30 to avoid applying textures to parts that won’t be seen will that have a more negative impact on my framerate then if I just put the fixtures over the wall’s texture? :???:

:notworthy:

(wudan) #2

Just put the fixtures on. Cutting your brush up will likely force a lot of ‘triangles’ to be drawn … of course, if you are using q3map2 (if you are here, I think you are), make sure you have -meta turned on during the BSP phase, that’ll clean some of the brushes up.

(Valhue2) #3

Now there are exceptions to caulking behind brushes… say those ‘fixtures’ are solid, you need to caulk the back of that fixture but you dont need to split up the wall behind it just to caulk the wall behind it. Ok heres a hypothetical example:

You have a wall, dimensions of 1024lx512h, now you have your ‘fixture’ that is just a square light. You position your square light (dimensions 32^3) in the very center of the wall… all you have to do is caulk the rear face of this light, but you dont have to split the wall behind it into 4 brushes… the way Quake3 handles faces and splitting faces is different then… say the way Halflife handles splitting faces (only a reference because this is where i started mapping). If that light just touches one brush, the brush it touches wont be split up in compilation. If the light brush touches 2 brushes, or is on a single brush but buts up against another brush (touching it) it will split up both brushes. So… it doesnt matter how many fixtures you have on that wall,… as long as they dont touch another brush (meaning at a different angle then the origional brush, like a wall touching a ceiling, or a wall touching another wall at a joint/bevel) you wont have to worry about that face being split.

Now im fairly new to q3 mapping myself, and this might be just a factor of q3map2,… im not 100% sure of this… hopefully someone will correct me on this… but this is the impression that im under about brushes splitting faces… now there are indeed a lot more possibilities of brush faces getting split and as a matter of fact http://www.quake3world.com/ubb/Forum6/HTML/020488.html? might help you out a bit understanding some of the, should be, basic ways of building… now i cant recollect if it mentions anything about brushes getting split… but none-the-less its a great read if you havent yet read it.

V^2