FOG, VIS, SHADER questions.

(bradsmithee) #1

3 problems.

1) I need the skybox to ignore level-wide fog. “surfaceparm nofog” and “q3map_nofog” seem to have no effect.

2) Probably one of the most REDUNDENT questions this board has seen but… “MAX VISIBILITY ERROR”. Unresolvable by non-radiant means? I’ve read through dozens of tutorials, articles, ect. that basically just tell me to create more detailed brushes and what not. Problem is that the ENTIRE map is a 3dsmax .md3 mesh imported terrain mapobject, 13000 triangles roughly, using radiant sizes of about 65000+, and involves no internal brushwork (aside from a skybox). I merely imported the model and compiled. Looks and runs great ingame (although vis would help a bit on the frame-rates).

Max vis table holds 2mb from what I’ve read thus far. I’ve found an bsp compilation application that SEEMED to resolve this but as far as I know it only supports Quake 1 seeing as I get a version mismatch on the BSP file.
http://user.tninet.se/~xir870k/ <-- found here. Is this only a limitation of the q3map2 compiler I assume then? Perhaps its merely that the earlier quake engines have actually released in full…dunno.

3) I need a 2 sequence shader piece. 1st stage would be nothing but an alphamap data. 2nd stage would be the base texture (grass for example). The base texture needs to inherit the alpha from the 1st stage. This becomes necessary if your running a mesh plane over a base plane (with proper z-depths to avoid z-fights) and you need a decal of some sort (dirt patch) that will not lose quality with size. Although the alphamap would scale, the texture would tile and retain quality within a particular area. I need this to be done in a shader sequence without radiant involvements.

Any help is appreciated. :slight_smile:

(SCDS_reyalP) #2

What game ? In RTCW and ET, you can do this using skyfogvars and density fog. Don’t know about other games. There are some examples in the shaders included with those games.

2) Probably one of the most REDUNDENT questions this board has seen but… “MAX VISIBILITY ERROR”. Unresolvable by non-radiant means? I’ve read through dozens of tutorials, articles, ect. that basically just tell me to create more detailed brushes and what not. Problem is that the ENTIRE map is a 3dsmax .md3 mesh imported terrain mapobject, 13000 triangles roughly, using radiant sizes of about 65000+, and involves no internal brushwork (aside from a skybox). I merely imported the model and compiled. Looks and runs great ingame (although vis would help a bit on the frame-rates).

You most likely need to up your _blocksize in worldspawn. Q3map automatically splits your map up on block bounderies (every 1024 units along each axis, by default).

Even if you aren’t going to have structure at all, you probably want some blocks. distance culling (which I assume you are using since you are using fog) needs it, and collisioon detection should be more efficient.

(bradsmithee) #3

Its Quake 3.
I tried to adjust the _blocksize from 2048 in increments past the 60,000 range still with no result on the vis stage :frowning:

(The5thHorsemen) #4

your making the block size bigger which is increasing the size of the split which is the exact opposite of what I think you said you wanted to do no?
have you tried decreasing the block size ?

and what worldspawn entity keyword values are you using?

fogculling and farplane culling is what your trying to do I think .
you need to match the distance to fog opaque with the farplane distance and fog cull .
at lest in most cases that’s what you do.

you should still be able to use caulk brush’s and antiportal brush’s to set up a structural level even if your using nothing but imported models.

MAX_VISABLITY I think means you compiled the .map file with a leak which caused every compiled non culled brush to be drawn

(SCDS_reyalP) #5

A smaller blocksize will cause more vis data.

(The5thHorsemen) #6

with a q3 fog hull in place it should shorten the visable distance though at lest it used too if I remember correctly .

but after reading the post agin if there is a visability error in the compile it doesn’t matter because the foghull cannot work with a MAX_VISABLITY error anyway ,
I think theres a script error in the q3 foghull construction , maybe it’s not pointing to the proper path .

(obsidian) #7

Foghull stuff:

http://www.shaderlab.com/q3map2/shader_manual/apC.html