First Proper Room(s)
nightdragon
Join Date: 2003-01-05 Member: 11848Members, Constellation
Join Date: 2003-01-05 Member: 11848Members, Constellation
<div class="IPBDescription">pics....</div> Only have 2 picstures really, but wanted to know what you thought. The basic design is a water processing plant, red sky etc (blue in screens, will be red when I post some up to date one, and the up to date ones will have skylit areas.)
First: A room just after the Access Passageways, will have a door behind from where the screenie was taken that is inaccesable because of flood.
First: A room just after the Access Passageways, will have a door behind from where the screenie was taken that is inaccesable because of flood.
Comments
Oh and also, I have a problem with ambient_generic, I have a water sound where the pipe is, but i put another ambient_generic in the next room and cant hear it, even when out of range of the previous one. Even with replica settings a different wav....
Most maps use lots of geometric detail in walls(such as pillars, supports, smooth corners, big machinery, walk ways etc.). Nobody likes plain flat perpendicular walls much.
The vertex editing tool(ctrl +f allows you to add a vertex if you select a "midpoint" inbetween 2 vertices, this is very useful), the clipping tool(press the icon repetedly to change inbetween the different modes of which pieces to keep), the texture locking tool(allows you to scale, rotate and translate a brush without the textures appearence changing, very useful) and the cylinder(can make a smooth convex corner, for 90 or 180 degrees just clip of excess) and arch primitives(can be used for smooth concave corners) allow you to easily make these things.
"Odd angled" geometry(things with sides that are not parallell with the coordinate axes in the editor) touching a face will split it into many convex pieces(as many as it takes) which is not good for performance, entities(such as func_walls) do not split up world geometry this way. Also, you can often make a small different textured brush that the odd angled object(pillar for example) is standing on and then only that brush would get cut up at weird angles not the entire floor.
To see what the world polygons look like when the map is compiled use gl_wireframe, 1 lets you see an overlaid wireframe version of all polygons that are visible to you and 2 lets you see all polygons that the engine renders overlaid with wireframe(even things behind some walls and pillars that are rendered but is eventually overdrawn). To see that you are getting descent performance use r_speeds 1, this lets you see how many world polygons the engine renders(w_polys) and entity polygons(e_polys). You have little controll over e_polys(they are players, resource nodes and other models that appear in-game), but you have total controll over w_polys, try to keep this under 400 in high usage areas).
Fix that and it should be good <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'><!--endemo-->
-MasterMike
Can you give me an example of this? I'm worried that I might be doing something like this without realizing it (getting a w_poly of 650 in a relatively simple room).
Water processing plant = Large tubes (BUBBLIES BUBBLIES BUBBLES!), generators, rooms with big pipes heading through them, chemical rooms...
In conclusion: Think about what the rooms would be, if they really existed. Big, empty rooms just don't make sense. (Make a mess hall, crew quarters... something like that).
Use gl_wireframe 1 or gl_wireframe 2. This will only work on a "single player game" started from the console. It refuses to work in multiplayer because people might exploit it to see geometry they should not(walls in a dark area or non-visible surfaces). Hence if you still have ns 2.0 installed or using WON 3.0 beta 1/2 start a game by going to the console and typing "map <mymap>". gl_texturemode 2 shows you everything thats visible to the engine(and rendered) and this is what counts r_speeds wise. gl_wireframe 1 shows you only visible polygons.
Here is an example of having weird angled things touch a wall <a href='http://hem.bredband.net/congal/temp/HalfLife03.jpg' target='_blank'>pipes touching an ugly blue wall</a>. Here's an example of pipes either made of entities(func_wall for example) or 1 unit away from touching the wall with the non-visible sides NULL textured(I don't remember which) <a href='http://hem.bredband.net/congal/temp/HalfLife04.jpg' target='_blank'>pipes <i>not</i> touching an ugly blue wall</a>
edit: The engine want's to have only convex polygons so it has to split non convex faces into bits. Furthermore it want's to split faces into polygons that are no larger than 240x240 if the texture scale is 1. If the texture scale is larger/smaller it splits faces in polygons that are (240*x-scale)x(240*y-scale) I think, anyway if you scale textures up things generally get ugliear and you generally use less polygons and light patches.