Razztazzmagoria2 and the stupid junk I have to do to make it work

(VolumetricSteve) #1

So the title about says it all, some of you may have noticed at other places on the web there have been slight cries for help about this map I’m working on; mostly that I was planning on building a small cluster to compile it.

First off, fun news: I fixed a lot of the VIS problems I’ve been having, the random frame-rate drops have been fixed. The first full test compile was completed today and work has resumed in full.

Second, I did some play testing, I could post screenshots if anyone’s interested. It needs a lot of work, but it’s as gigantic as it is fun.

My reason for posting here though is that I can’t seem to get BSPC to work.

I get a MAX_MAPFILE_BRUSHES error, which is odd because I keep seeing that the maximum brush count should be 65,000~ and I only have 35,000 brushes in my map.

I’m trying to think of ways to circumvent any weird “maximum whatever” issues, as my map is huge. Any ideas?

I had the idea of “enameling” levels done in my “razztazz” style before with RTMG1 where I’d put a “bot do not enter” brush over the whole floor, so the bspc process would only see one big floor brush, and not 8 billion little tiles. It worked there, and I’m hoping I don’t have to do that again, so I’m looking for fresh ideas on how to go about forcing bspc to handle my level.

Thanks

*edit, interesting point of note, I’ve heard conflicting things about how “donotenter” and “botclip” textures work, but I’ve tried covering most of the map in this just to see if bspc would work under the drastically reduced workload, but…it seems like those brushes aren’t telling bspc to omit any brushes from its workload, what gives? it keeps trying to process the entire level even though i’ve covered virtually everything in “do not compile this” texture.

(obsidian) #2

If simple optimization doesn’t fix it, you can fix it with some extra elbow grease and -fixaas

http://www.simonoc.com/pages/design/maps_q3/pom_bots.htm

(VolumetricSteve) #3

That looks incredibly promising, I’ll likely work on that tomorrow.

Also, how often is it that quake 3 maps are made that cause overflows in bspc?

I was really starting to think that out of all of the quake 3 maps I’ve seen, I haven’t seen any as compiler-intensive or geometrically complex as the monsters I’ve produced, if anyone out there knows of some seriously complex or gigantic maps, please post them here, i’d love to see them.

Thanks

(obsidian) #4

No, not too many. Usually, it can be avoided by mapping “clean” and optimizing. Large terrain maps and force clipped models might do it. See sock’s PoM map that he is referring to in the tutorial.

(VolumetricSteve) #5

What do you mean by mapping clean? Were you referring to something in the PoM article you mentioned?

RTMG 2 seems to be too complex for my enameling process (as I browsed the article you mentioned, it seems like that guy ran into the exact same problem I have)

So it looks like I’ll be doing the simplified map and -fixaas thing unless you had another idea, I’m always open to suggestions.

Thanks

(obsidian) #6

Well, mapping clean is just stuff like caulking unseen sides, converting brushes to hint, minimizing t-junctions and overlapping brushes and overdraw, etc, etc, etc.

(VolumetricSteve) #7

slightly off topic question, and I feel silly asking this in the light of how complex my work has been up until this point…

How do you make a really good levelshot (loading splash screen) I’ve been googling for like 30 minutes and it seems it’s omitted from every mapping tutorial I could find. Or atleast it’s only mentioned as “then you take a screen shot, and you’re done!”

I know it needs to be a TGA file, I’ve heard that it should be 256x256 but I’ve done this once before with an 800x600 TGA and it worked fine there. The real issue I’m having now is that when I load up this level, it shows the big quake3 logo default screen briefly, then it shows my levelshot, then jumps into the game.

Previously, I’ve just loaded up one of my maps, and it directly shows my custom splash screen. Why is it delaying this time?

Is there anything special I need to do with a .arena file?

Thanks

edit:

just kidding, I reloaded quake 3 and the map, the thumbnail shows up correctly, however, there is still a strange delay upon loading the level and showing the level’s custom splash screen. Is this fixable or is it just a quake 3 quirk? Thanks

(obsidian) #8

Try making the image in a power-of-2 dimensions, so 256x256 or 512x512. Video cards are optimized to load textures of 2^n dimensions into memory, I assume the delay is that it is having problems parsing the data and is forced to compress it before loading.

As far as taking good screenshots, hide the menu and gun (\cg_draw2d 0, \cg_drawgun 0). Sometimes changing the FoV makes nice results (\cg_fov 120 or something). No clip (
oclip) is useful so you can back into a corner or fly around to find a nice angle.

(VolumetricSteve) #9

that makes sense, but would…1024x1024 work or would the fact it’s such a large image cause the same delay caused by a strange size?

also, I have a 6 core processor, an nvidia 460gtx, a ton of ram, and all of this data is being handled on an SSD drive. There are no mechanical parts on my computer aside from a few relays in the powersupply, and fans. Should loading a N sized TGA file really take any longer than a few milliseconds?

I’ll try resizing it to see what happens…could the image be a jpg? or something that isn’t one of the world’s silliest image formats?

thanks

(obsidian) #10

You’ll have to try it to find out. It’s based on my assumption given how texture memory works.

.jpg or .tga is fine. Nothing silly about .tga though, quite popular in computer graphic circles. It compresses well in a .zip, often times smaller than a .jpg without being lossy.