hint brushes, areaportals and such stuff

(SoulRebel) #1

hi!

a question to the experts here:

how do i use hint-brushes and areaportals in the right way?

on some tuts there are only small (tiny) brushes only on the doorway… but on goldrush-map there are very big hint-brushes…

are there other common-textures or techniques to optimize the fps on the map?

nr…from austria

(Shallow) #2

It’s not worth using areaportals in multiplayer maps, IMO.

As for hinting… you need to understand what the bsp and vis processes do to be able to hint well. Here’s one of the best discussions of hinting and PVS ever:

http://www.quake3world.com/ubb/Forum6/HTML/020488.html?

Here’s a slightly less scary tutorial:

http://fps.brainerd.net/hintbrushes.htm

Here’s the very scary SPoG technical docs:

http://www.planetquake.com/spog/stuff/technical.html

Note that all the above were written before we had the skip shader. Any axial faces of hint brushes should probably have the skip shader on them. All of the above information is fairly intimidating and will take some time to understand - but at some point, you will get the idea, and after that it will all seem obvious.

(DeAtHmAsTeR) #3

im jus confused after reading those pages - skip shaders? how do you use them and what are they for?

(Shallow) #4

Yep, this is a big thing to understand. You will probably have to read about it quite a bit before you get it. Looking at stuff helps you to understand more quickly - run a bsp -meta compile on your map and then use the portal viewer plugin for radiant to look at the portals, then read some more stuff.

The skip shader is essentially a shader that doesn’t do anything, but doesn’t stop hint faces on the same brush from working. Which as an explanation is probably not much help to you at present so don’t worry about it :slight_smile: You’ll get there in the end.

(SoulRebel) #5

thx so far…

i tried r_showtris 1 …

is it true, that the engine will not calculate the polys behind walls (or natural view-blockers like mountains)… even WITHOUT a hint brush?

(SCDS_reyalP) #6

Noooo.
Splashdamage changed r_showtris, so r_showtris 1 is z-buffered (just like regular geometry.

r_showtris 2 give you the old behaviour.

edit:
BTW, the portal viewer plugin can help you see the effects of structure, detail, hint, skip etc. Here is another tutorial:
http://www.nibsworld.com/rtcw/tutorial_detail_and_hint_brushes_part1.shtml