thickness of walls

(freekill) #1

how thick should my standard walls be 32??
i noticed in goldrush the walls are pretty thick

(fidel castro) #2

there is no standard

just map it your way g

greez
fidel

(Flash95) #3

I have found that 8 is the minimum you want to use. thiner than that and
somtimes the game does not clip correctly (things show through )
like explosions and gun tips. we have all seen guns sticking through closed doors.

(damocles) #4

And then there’s lighting to consider. Normal lighgtmap resolution is not very good and you may see light leaking under walls that are less than 32 units thick. There are of course ways to prevent this, so learn them - they are simple mapping techniques.

Or you can increase the light mapping resolution, but that makes for bigger file sizes. It’s all a balancing act really.

(evillair) #5

…and don’t forget the visual aspect of it also, in most cases; a bunker wall will be thicker then a house wall. A structure wall will be thicker then a seperator wall.

(Loffy) #6

Yes, I see light sneaking in! In my mapping. I have houses, where light sneak in in corners and such. Annoying, but I can live with that. (I just want the scripts to work first - then I do the detail, I used to think.)
But there are ways to fix this? Hm, I must try to fix it. Just to see if I can get it to dissapear.

When you talk about walls that are 32 units think, how thick is that? I mean, i usually have grid 8 (hit key 4, for gridsize 8). Is that size 8? Then a 32 wall must be mega thick, compared to my tiny, thin walls!

// Loffy

(damocles) #7

32 in game is quite thick to look at, a little thicker than say a house wall, but not as thick as a bunker wall. Yeah, its 4 squares at a size 8 (key 4) grid.

As for light leaking under thin walls - if I rememebr correctly (which I probably don’t) you have to group brushes strategically. Say for example you have two walls, and where they meet in a corner, light is leaking in. I think you’re supposed to make each wall a func_group and it should tell the compiler to refine the lightmaps to the edges of wall join (I think).

It’s not perfect, and I may even have it the wrong way round (it may be that you have to group the walls together, I’m a bit rusty on the theory). But play around, see what you can do.

The other trick is in how you construct the wall. A lot of mappers will do this (veiwed from above, X/Y plane):

When you really should be doing this:

That will remove any light leaking you might be getting in the corner of walls. You can do it with some floors too, but of course, not every floor will be in a good position to make joins like that.

The thing to remember is that the light maps generated for each wall will start and end in the top-left and bottom-right corners of the wall. If one of those corners happens to be sitting somewhere where at the right angle, a low resolution light map could miss the adjoining wall, then you get leaks.