VIS + Structural and Detail Brushes - help!

(Obli) #1

Hi all,

I’ve made a few posts before but would like to thank all again for their useful and helpful input - this forum is a crucial source of help!

I’ve made a few basic maps getting to grips first with ladders, arches, doors etc. Things have moved on and with the help of SD forums and various tutorials, I am including slightly more advanced aspects such as dynamitable walls, breakable objects and single-stage constructables - great!

I sat down and sketched out an idea for a map which I would like to start. Prior to this I would like to understand VIS a little better :???: Are there some basic guidelines I should follow to improve compile times? I’ve read of VIS blocking with structural, caulked brushes behind detail brushes but to be honest, I’m lost! :frowning: In fact, I only discovered recently that there are structural and detail brushes! :eek2:

Please would someone be so kind as to point me in the direction of a newbies tutorial or outline some basic tips…?

Also, slightly off the subject but I’ll ask!
With a large map terrain, is it best to design the floor, rock / hill walls surrounding and trenches for rivers as one terrain? Wouldn’t this cause FPS’s to grind to a halt (the map is approx 10,000 x 10,000 units in GTKRadiant) ? I had an idea to do the floor with Easygen and construct surrounding cliff faces with brushes and Phong Shading to sit on the floor.

Any help is most appreciated - thanks.

Regards,

Obli.

(ratty redemption) #2

with a large open terrain map, like Ive been building, we dont get much benefit from vis blocking, unless there are hills or tall buildings blocking the players view where we can build vis blocking architecture, one method is to hide large simple shaped caulk brushes inside the hills.

so to help the fr (frame rate) in open plan maps, it`s best to construct the terrain and any buildings with the minimum number of brushes we can get away with visually.

or we can use fog culling to limit how far into the distance the game engine can draw… personally Ive avoided dense fog in my latest map as its set in bright sun light.

and I dont think it matters if the terrain is all one func_group mesh or ungrouped into worldspawn brushes, or made from several groups, but its recommended to use the compile switch -meta which has the effect of turning the terrain meshes into large non planar sections at compile time.

the other guys can probably give you some direct links.

(jah) #3

hum… the best way to understand what are structural brushes and detail ones is to just open the sample goldrush map and hit ctrl+C … that will filter out all detail brushes and show only the structural ones… you will be able to realize better this way i think.

reading the tutorials in the stickys is a must tho (very good ones concerning vis there).

cheers.

(Marko) #4

A good source of info is Spog’s Q3 technical note:
http://www.swat-clan.com/marko/mapping/q3map_doc.htm

I also have a tiny tutorial giving the main lines of VIS & BPS process
http://www.swat-clan.com/marko/mapping/bsp.htm

(Obli) #5

Thanks for all your responses guys :smiley: Very helpful links Marko!

With a little research myself, I found these good tutorials… hope they can help someone else out :clap:

Detail brushes
http://www.nibsworld.com/rtcw/tutorial_detail_and_hint_brushes_part1.shtml

Hint brushes
http://www.nibsworld.com/rtcw/tutorial_detail_and_hint_brushes_part2.shtml

‘VIS for dummies’
http://w1.261.telia.com/~u26123488/vis/visfordummies.htm

‘Portals and Blocksize’
http://www.planetwolfenstein.com/tramdesign/tutorials/tut_portalsblocksize.html

VIS Design - SD forum post
http://www.splashdamage.com/index.php?name=pnPHPbb2&file=viewtopic&t=4474&highlight=detail+structural

The best forum post I found was from some Q3 site forum and now I can’t find the link although it is copied to my HD! I covered most aspects that a newbie mapper wants to know about :disgust: Anyone else wanting to get their head around VIS etc. should search these forums! Just searching for all terms ‘detail’ AND ‘strucural’ returned many useful articles!

Must rest now… my brain has overloaded trying to take all this in! Just hope I absorbed some of it! :blah: Sure it’ll be worth it! :beer:

Cheers,

Obli

(G0-Gerbil) #6

Interesting note from the portals and blocksize link above - it claims vis is performed by checking from the corners of the portals only - this would generate rather huge VIS errors on big portals - is what the article states true, and if so how does it fudge the calculations to ensure minimal VIS errors (automatically adds adjacent portals etc?).

Overall one thing stands out - that many of the tutorials try to explain how VIS works and get the technical details just plain wrong. What’s stupid about it is people don’t need to know exactly what is going on, just the end results, yet people continue to post wrong info on it :confused: