some questions about the editor
<div class="IPBDescription">forum's searchfunction sucks</div>Allright, i managed to work with the editor so far. I am working by the book - more or less - by establishing a greybox-map first ... only a few props so far.
I have several problems and further questions.
Questions
OcclusionGeometry Group:
Do i have to assign a texture to the face, in order to make OcclusionGeometry work (the default face seems to be a texture though) ?
I can add several faces to one and the same rectangle. Does it work, when i use the back-face for OcclusionGeometry and the front face for a visible texture ?
In that case, will the front face be calculated, when the player stands on the opposite side (in front of the OcclusionGeometry face) ?
Does it matter which side the face faces, when i add it to the OcclusionGeometry Group ?
Explenation: I want to determin if i have to allways place 3 Faces, to assign the middle Face for OcclusionGeometry, the inner face visible from within the room and the outer faces visible from outside, to avoid unecessary calculating of the innerroom while standing outside of it.
Right now, the hives spawn eggs outside the Hiveroom (more or less in free space, but on ground :D ). Is it caused by my eventuell broken geometrical set up of the hiveroom or do i have to place the hive in the middle of the room, if i have accessable areas outside of the hiveroom ?
Problems:
At far discances my outer faces look pale, there seems to be some kind of fog inbetween. Its ###### retarded, i hate it soooo much ( i have deactivated atmospherics ingame ). Is there any way to prevent this from happening ? Does a skybox maybe fix this problem ?
<!--coloro:orange--><span style="color:orange"><!--/coloro--><sub>*Link removed due to NSFW content on the page* - Angelusz<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc--></sub>
<a href="http://imgur.com/zBnvu" target="_blank">http://imgur.com/zBnvu</a>
Why cant i load the skybox ie from refinery for my own map, when starting NS2 ? The damn error msg says, it cant load the cinematic-file and reports exactly the directory where the skybox-file is. This information doesnt help at all, because the file is exactly where the debug-msg wants it to be.
I know that i ve done something wrong with my map, but i dont want to crawl in this forum and ask stupid questions :/ .
I have the same problems with every prop i place in my map. I need this to work, before i continue with further details of the map.
I have several problems and further questions.
Questions
OcclusionGeometry Group:
Do i have to assign a texture to the face, in order to make OcclusionGeometry work (the default face seems to be a texture though) ?
I can add several faces to one and the same rectangle. Does it work, when i use the back-face for OcclusionGeometry and the front face for a visible texture ?
In that case, will the front face be calculated, when the player stands on the opposite side (in front of the OcclusionGeometry face) ?
Does it matter which side the face faces, when i add it to the OcclusionGeometry Group ?
Explenation: I want to determin if i have to allways place 3 Faces, to assign the middle Face for OcclusionGeometry, the inner face visible from within the room and the outer faces visible from outside, to avoid unecessary calculating of the innerroom while standing outside of it.
Right now, the hives spawn eggs outside the Hiveroom (more or less in free space, but on ground :D ). Is it caused by my eventuell broken geometrical set up of the hiveroom or do i have to place the hive in the middle of the room, if i have accessable areas outside of the hiveroom ?
Problems:
At far discances my outer faces look pale, there seems to be some kind of fog inbetween. Its ###### retarded, i hate it soooo much ( i have deactivated atmospherics ingame ). Is there any way to prevent this from happening ? Does a skybox maybe fix this problem ?
<!--coloro:orange--><span style="color:orange"><!--/coloro--><sub>*Link removed due to NSFW content on the page* - Angelusz<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc--></sub>
<a href="http://imgur.com/zBnvu" target="_blank">http://imgur.com/zBnvu</a>
Why cant i load the skybox ie from refinery for my own map, when starting NS2 ? The damn error msg says, it cant load the cinematic-file and reports exactly the directory where the skybox-file is. This information doesnt help at all, because the file is exactly where the debug-msg wants it to be.
I know that i ve done something wrong with my map, but i dont want to crawl in this forum and ask stupid questions :/ .
I have the same problems with every prop i place in my map. I need this to work, before i continue with further details of the map.
Comments
If you completely wing it I think you'll miss out on a lot of good props and textures.
You have these props and textures to work with, and even with rescaling it can be kind of hard to fit them in AFTER you've greyboxed your level. If you rummage through them, pick the ones you like and make a series of small tests rooms and corridor sections, you'll be able to establish the basic look and feel you want and then make the greybox to fit the styles you have chose.
Placing 3 faces, making two of the faces facing opposite directions, adding them to occlusiongeometry and using one face for texture seems to work.
Its hard to tell though, because occlusiongeometry is buggy when checking the results with r_wireframe.
Looking from alienstart to marinestart works perfectly ( rooms next to each other ) ... but from marinestart it depends on the angle of my LOS if the hive and other stuff is shown or not. Both rooms have the exact same build.
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/GcT8f.png" target="_blank">http://i.imgur.com/GcT8f.png</a> perspective view OcclusionGeometry highlighted
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/i2RF6.png" target="_blank">http://i.imgur.com/i2RF6.png</a> top view OcclusionGeometry highlighted
Ingame direct LOS, no hive:
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/GwoLc.png" target="_blank">http://i.imgur.com/GwoLc.png</a>
Different angle, hive appears:
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/JRq3D.png" target="_blank">http://i.imgur.com/JRq3D.png</a>
I guess that can cause unnecessary FPS-drops.
Youre best option is to just make the occlusion geometry fit the shape of your room as closely as possibly, but with as few faces as you can get away with. For the most part just simple large faces, but for connecting corridoors you will want to add in geometry as closely as you can.
Egg spawns may at times spawn outside of walls if there is a valid location to spawn at, that will probably be something that needs to be fixed in game later on, so if its a big issue in your map, for the time being youll just have to make sure if you have walls that seperate the hive from another room that there is enough space that they wont spawn through it.
There is an entity called "fog controls" that you need to add to your map, lowering the values there will decrease the range at which the fog appears in your map, and you can also change the color of it. You can remove it completely, but i wouldnt recommend it. If a room loses power and goes black, the fog is the only thing allowing a marine to get some bearings on the shape of the room, without it, the room will just be pitch black, unless he has his flashlight on, but it still really helps in the dark to have some of it. Also, there is another entity called fog_area_modifier which is a similar function, but is intended to be used in single rooms, and so it has an area that you can make the color or intensity different than the general fog settings set by fog controls.
The skybox cinematics can be a bit buggy at times, try setting the repeat style to "Loop" if that doesnt work, just try opening up summit, and copying the skybox entity, then paste it into your map.
Hope that helps
Like Jonacrab says, it's best to keep the number of occlusion faces as low as possible by making them big - sometimes the faces don't close properly so the engine tries to render these small gaps.
I guess placing 3 faces and making 2 of them OcclusionGeometry isnt a viable option then.
Changing the path of the skybox-cinematic to summit's skyboy-cinematic worked.
fog_control worked aswell.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/nTg4P.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
It's a good idea to take a good look at the official maps to get a guide for how this stuff is done.
And to take a look at the official maps doesnt help me much, because r_wireframe allways shows a bunch of geometry calculated beyond the occlusionfaces ( after i knew the positions of some occlusiongeometry faces, i checked them ingame ... nothing to learn there ).
Another thing is, i do need occlusiongeometry facing inside AND outside. The hull should be rendered when looking at it, but not the inside of the whole module and as soon as the player is inside, i dont want him to render the outer hull and other modules surrounding the entered module. But thats no issue anymore, i just place 2 faces facing the oposite direction (between the hull and the inner room) and add them to the occlusiongeometry.
I literally want all the hulls of the modules to be rendered, to be seen at all times... if i dont keep an eye on occlusiongeometry facing both sides, the map will have a very bad performance.
I'm not sure that's accurate. In the event that occlusion geometry fails to seal properly(is this still an issue for properly welded geometry?), the odds of two 1-pixel holes/glitches overlaping in screenspace is astronomically small. Making occlusion geometry double sided is almost zero extra work(copy-paste, add to a different layer, add to OcclusionGeometry group, ctrl+f to flip all faces) and the cost of rendering more occlusion geometry for occlusion queries should be pretty minimal.
Unfortunatly i have to use inner and outer occlusiongeometry for my map ... the theme is forcing me too.
But one is for sure, there is unnecessary rendering even with perfect occlusiongeometry. In my testscenario, i just place two different cubes around my two rooms, made the faces face inside and added them to occlusiongeometry... still rendering the hive and the onos on the other side, when i reach a certain angle of my LOS. When i look straight to the other room , everything is fine.
I will see how this will work out, once the map is completed. But nearly 2000 draw calls is pretty much (maximum when facing from far away to the center), when i ve just established a map made of geometry only.
I can probably reduce the amount of faces by 30% with the informations ive got so far... so thanks for that (wont change a lot to the drawcalls though).
At least i dont have to bother anymore, when testing the map with r_wireframe and see unnecessary rendering. It was pretty annoying to search for mistakes, when there actually were none.
I have problems with annoying blur-effects at far distances but for now i have enough to work on. But i would like to know, if the engine can manage far distances precisely... in my opening post, the blue "lines" in the middle of the screenshots are actually some kind of windows... unfortunately they tend to blur at distance and look like a line around the station.
Is there anykind of workaround or do i have to adjust the textures ( which will look odd at close distance ) ?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the occlusion geometry only turns off rendering of props and lighting.
If you enable alien vision there still seems to be microscopic holes randomly appearing along edges where polygons meet. Unless it's only on T-junctions, this shouldn't be the case. If this is fixed for properly welded geometry then obviously don't bother.
<!--quoteo(post=1953287:date=Jul 23 2012, 04:11 PM:name=Insane)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Insane @ Jul 23 2012, 04:11 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1953287"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Besides, if there's a gap, adding an outer face isn't going to fix that.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Well yes it will. If you add an extra wall, you not only have to see out of a 1-pixel hole in your wall, you have to see into a 1-pixel hole on a distant wall. The odds that those 1-pixel holes overlap in screenspace is nill.
This doesn't happen for welded geometry, which is why I said OcclusionGeometry is the only thing I'd bother with having it be entirely welded.
Do you see any downsides in welding geometry in general? Because to me it seems very advantageous. It allows you to move you geometry more easily and you don't get confused by strange behavior of it. Also it seems to resolve all alien vision problems for me.
If i want to replace something entirely, i cut the faces i want to replace, and delete lines and vertices afterwards. I also think it makes manipulating existing geometry more easy, since you won't draw on the wrong line/vertice.
If i want to replace something entirely, i cut the faces i want to replace, and delete lines and vertices afterwards. I also think it makes manipulating existing geometry more easy, since you won't draw on the wrong line/vertice.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It does have a very big downside, you can't manipulate geometry freely, like you could in Hammer. This works for very small pieces, but when you want to separate something bigger and more intrincate (as it will happen when your level is bigger or more complex) you will have a hard time manipulating it as it will be related to far too much stuff to do what you propose.
For instance, expanding Data Core in summit has proved a very frustrating experience, even with the ugly temp visuals, and I still have to do it again when I integrate it with the official version, I'm not looking forward to that.
What's strange behavior for you? I like keeping my stuff separate so I have total control over it. The expected behavior for me is if I want to move a wall, it won't drag the floor, the ceiling and a part of a pillar with me, or require me to carefully cut and paste the geometry and then remove all the lines that are not needed anymore. Perhaps people are using more props and that's why they don't have any issues with it? Or maybe they haven't had to rework a room while reusing existing geometry yet.
What i think is confusing behavior, is that if you create your geometry with anything other than copy+paste, you will have connected vertices. So you'll have some connected, and some unconnected vertices, and once you want to shift something, you'll have to cut paste, to un-connect it, or move the unconnected vertices manually.
Don't you work a lot with the line and line-extraction tool? How do you keep your geo separated? Do you cut + paste it, once you're done?
Another question: What about the sparkles in alien vision? In my tests, they vanished when i welded my geo. Before that, i tried to get rid of them by realigning vertices to the grid, but it didn't work (everything was on grid, yet it had sparkles). Is there another way to get rid of them?
This is obviously a matter of personal preference. I also do what you mentioned to separate welded stuff, but I have a feeling if Spark let you "ignore" the welding, ala Hammer ignore group function, and recreated the needed lines to make moving welded stuff simple, I'd use it a lot more. I also dislike double clicking and having like half the map selected, I usually double click something and it'll result in having all faces of a pillar selected or something like that, in the way I work, which I feel is more efficient/useful.
You can see how I map in my Twitch channel or my youtube channel (in my sig). But I normally make a whole new separate face elsewhere, and then move it into place and work on it. I barely use the line tool, just to split faces or add new vertices. I also use the extrude function a lot. Maybe watch the videos for my own map (ns2_tisza) instead of the summit ones, as the summit ones are pretty much all moving stuff around and doing ugly stuff without caring about how tidy stuff is (as it's all going to be discarded).
This usually results in having a wall "piece" connected, with the floor and ceiling separated, so I can double click it and move it elsewhere... but I don't give it much thought. I guess the videos will explain this better.
The cracks... you just live with them, you'll see them on the official maps, too. I made a tool to perfectly align to the grid and the cracks are still there, so I'd say it's nothing to worry about. And maybe alien vision needs to be adjusted, or the way the engine renders this kind of thing.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the occlusion geometry only turns off rendering of props and lighting.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
There wont be any problems for spectators, they can still see the hull. According to my r_wireframe tests, it does turn off geometry aswell:
<!--quoteo(post=0:date=:name=Kasperle)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Kasperle)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Ingame direct LOS, no hive:
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/GwoLc.png" target="_blank">http://i.imgur.com/GwoLc.png</a>
Different angle, hive appears:
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/JRq3D.png" target="_blank">http://i.imgur.com/JRq3D.png</a><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
If your geo is welded, there are no sparkles at all (though i don't know, how this behaves, if there are props). You should give it a try. Save in a different file, and see if it works for you. The sparkles are overlapping lines of two different faces.
I already had a short look at your videos, it helped me a lot. Thanks! I didn't use the line extraction before, and it makes work a lot more pleasant.
It seems that the lines and their vertices jump to the next nearest vertice in certain situations.
I encountered several slightly overlapping faces after i rotated the first by 90° (scaled it aswell) and the second by 180° (no scaling here) . Two times the same issue but different faces. I checked the original, no mistakes there.
I managed to reproduce the error by scaling the original. But it did happen with 180° rotation as far as i can remember ( wasnt able to reproduce it though ).
Original:
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/6BZ6q.jpg" target="_blank">http://i.imgur.com/6BZ6q.jpg</a>
Copy, 180° rotation and scaled down, faces have changed:
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/iu6N5.jpg" target="_blank">http://i.imgur.com/iu6N5.jpg</a>
Do i have to pay attention on placing the vertices properly on the grid, to prevent that from happening ?
So much for the error i encountered. Is there any mapper, that can link me a video or tell me how to do those slightly complex structures without having to adjust over 400 faces manually (i didnt activate lock textures for this short reproduction, textures are actually all in place, but it took some time) ? There must be an easier way... i guess.
Or cycle the movement origin. Or use the axis lock mode.
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/uZmwI.jpg" target="_blank">http://i.imgur.com/uZmwI.jpg</a> (jpg sucks, but imgur allways converts png to jpg...)
The interior of the rr will look like this:
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/Nk74v.jpg" target="_blank">http://i.imgur.com/Nk74v.jpg</a> (was just a case study, not well adjusted trims and textures)
Its unbelievable to see the fps drop, as soon as the hiveroom is rendered. The three ships will be placed in the inner circle of a spacestation. Is there any way to let the 3 ships fly around the main module... that would be really awesome (even though its the rr and needs to be static perhaps... i dont know, if thats the case ) ?
If the rr needs to be static, or if there is no way to let them fly around the inner module, i have to delete the thrusteranimations...
If there is a possibility to let my geometry fly around the inner module, but not the rr, i would just duplicate it. One is the real rr and one is the fake rr flying around the spacestation.
These three ships will be visible from all windows of the spacestation to create a special feeling / environment for the player (maybe the whole space around the spacestation will be accessable for the players as lerks or with JP, it depends on the overall performance of the map).
Creating the inner rr will be a peace of cake. I have one big problem right now ... my builder doesnt work at all. From my point of view, all the tutorials are not up to date( or my builder is bugged or i use photoshop incorrectly, it could be my fault in generall aswell :D ). I need this to work. The case study above for example ... i want the main monitor for the captains place to show stuff, but i cant edit it or create my own right now. It is a small detaill but very very important to create the right environment for the players. I have to use props that are totally awefull for my theme.
I even have black textures in my texture browser. I tried to edit the materialfiles to the new format, but that only worked for one single file (it was a texturepack i downloaded). Its really strange because i used allways the same format and it was a pain in the ass to edit over 50 material-files.
I would like to have all links/informations regarding the builder and creating textures or even props with photoshop cs3.
I wont say what i ve done and failed with so far, cause i dont even know if the informations i gathered are valid.