Why use caulk texture ?????

(Spitfire.be) #1

Why use caulk texture???

(Loffy) #2

hm, i think it is because the engine does not draw the surface. So, if the back of the wall, for example, is never visible to players, you can caulk it. Then the engine will seldom if ever draw that back wall.
Less triangles for the engine to draw in other words.
//L.

([SSM] Shadow Meat) #3

more caulk - less textured sufaces= LESS filesize, LESS lag, And LESS filesize!

(Jaquboss) #4

Uh :???:
Loffy’s explanation sounded more realistic…
However its about how the caulk is compiled… Maybe you are right too…

(CooperHawkes) #5

replace “seldom if ever” with “never” :wink:

(carnage) #6

umm also use it to make the caulk hull of ur map to set up ur main vis areas

(Lanz) #7

The only place you actually need to use caulk is on places the engine can se but the player can’t. For example, non visible planes of a detail brush or behind a curve like a patch mesh. It’s also good to use caulk on places the player can’t reach, like on top of a building a player can’t see. The rest of the places like on the outside hull or between two structural brushes are culled anyway.

That said, many including myself use caulk brushes on all non visible brush faces. One reason is out of habit, another one is that you can easily just turn structural brushes into detail without having to go back and caulk those non visible faces. A third reason is that an effective way of building your map is to make large structural brushes and then add detail brushes that covers them, for example a fasad on a house made all detail with hidden structural caulk brushes behind it to lower/simplefy the number of needed portals and speed up compile time. But to build like that requires a good knowledge of how the engine draws the portals.

When you feel ready for it, a very good although technical explanation of what happens when you compile a map is here http://www.planetquake.com/spog/stuff/technical.html. It’s a good thing to learn if you want to build maps effectively. Some of the info is for quake 3 like the info about the bspc compiler for bot navigation, though.