Message to the Devs(about spark)
Ink
Join Date: 2009-08-15 Member: 68499Members
Join Date: 2009-08-15 Member: 68499Members
Well ive mapped for years now on goldsrc and source. The one thing i hate or always hated was a leak.
There anoyying. Extremely hard to find (especially in goldsrc) and make compiling either very very long and ###### or really fast and nothing good.
I dunno how or what leaks will do in ns2. But heres my suggestion for the compile process.
If you can some how make it so when it notices there is a leak it will create 16x16 bright neon orange boxes where it is till the leak is filled. So when you run your map you can very quickly find that leak and fix it.
Now im just saying this i dunno how leaks or skyboxes or compiling will work for ns2 until it comes out. But heres just an idea if you have nothing yet.
There anoyying. Extremely hard to find (especially in goldsrc) and make compiling either very very long and ###### or really fast and nothing good.
I dunno how or what leaks will do in ns2. But heres my suggestion for the compile process.
If you can some how make it so when it notices there is a leak it will create 16x16 bright neon orange boxes where it is till the leak is filled. So when you run your map you can very quickly find that leak and fix it.
Now im just saying this i dunno how leaks or skyboxes or compiling will work for ns2 until it comes out. But heres just an idea if you have nothing yet.
Comments
Haha, I like that.
It's a hole in the map, where players could slip out and fall forever, or leak lighting, etc.
Basically a black hole of doom hidden in some 1x1 square in your map.
Really? That's amazing, could you explain?
- Beacon
- Beacon<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Information about the engine is all over the place. Just watch a video and you'll see.
if nothing is blocking your view you can see the whole level or as far as the clipping plane is set.
For me I dont find this amazing, What amazes me is a game that has leaks like Half-Life and Source.
Source has poor slow pre-calculated VIS, NS2 has superior <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm" target="_blank">Algorithms</a> to calcualte what can/cant be seen on the fly.
All the lighting is Dynamic, so there is no need to pre-calculate any single light in the game.
A HL map was made of brushes. It had to go through a process we called 'VBSP' to basically strip down all the unnecessary faces. There will surely be something like this for spark because not all the information in our .level files will be needed for the game.
For this compiling process to be successful (for HL), the compiler had to know where was the inside and where was the useless faces it could get rid of. It used the entities to know which side was which. That's why, apart from exceptions, you couldn't place entities outside of your map in HL.
If there was no distinction between the inside from the outside, that was called a leak.
Spark doesn't work like this.:
A map is basically a model, and hopefully, if you've worked well there's no unnecessary faces to discard.
>No VBSP
The occlusion and visibility is done in real time by the engine.
>No VVIS
Lighting is also done in realtime.
>No VRAD
Spark does everything in real time, something that wasn't possible for games in the times of HL. UWE has worked like this because it is a small team, it can't afford to wait for a compiler to be done. They need everything to spark right out into place.
And to answer your question ScardyBob, I guess it's a yes.
Uh Oh! My first map might have to be ns2_neverendingfall :) :) :)
UE2 didn't have leaks because it used a Subtractive BSP method, rather than the Additive BSP method used in Half-Life and Quake etc. Instead of creating geometry in an empty space, you basically carved geometry OUT of a big lump of 'bsp'. When you're carving out, there can't be any leaks. UE3 has the option of using either the Subtractive or Additive BSP methods. UE3 does not work in a similar way to the NS2 engine, if anything NS2 is closer to the Reality engine (which Epic incidentally bought out a few years ago, and appear to have done nothing with the tech).
NS2 doesn't leak because theres nothing to leak - there's no compile process. Everything is realtime (which btw is a pretty major accomplishment).
while it won't leak in the compile process, it will probably still be a hit on system resources to have a map that "leaks" won't it? and in order to make a space map, wouldn't you want stars and nebulas and all that stuff?
NS2s engine probably isn't that different from UE or Source. It might not use BSP, but it probably uses some similar tree or it falls back on the power of DirectX/OpenGL to decide what to and what not to render (OpenGL at least can occlude geometry not visible by the camera - your viewport into the game world) and I'm not sure how quick that is, but there would hopefully be some sort of mechanism to decide which geometry to draw and which to not draw before it passes to the renderer.
There anoyying. Extremely hard to find (especially in goldsrc) and make compiling either very very long and ###### or really fast and nothing good.
I dunno how or what leaks will do in ns2. But heres my suggestion for the compile process.
If you can some how make it so when it notices there is a leak it will create 16x16 bright neon orange boxes where it is till the leak is filled. So when you run your map you can very quickly find that leak and fix it.
Now im just saying this i dunno how leaks or skyboxes or compiling will work for ns2 until it comes out. But heres just an idea if you have nothing yet.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
In what hole u have been hiding all this time :D There are no such thing as a compile and leaks in ns2.
depends. By "space" I mean "floating in nowhere". Some really good Quake 1, 2 & 3 maps were like that.
<!--quoteo(post=0:date=:name=Draco_2k)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Draco_2k)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Yep, there's nothing to leak: NS2 doesn't do pre-computed portals or lighting, and there are no brushes to produce leaks themselves.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
really, no precomputed lighting? Worst part of doom 3 was no option for that. :( So many times it would be useful. But no portals either? D3 tech didn't just use portals to block vis (entitys didn't, so a door would need a portal to break the vis, for example) but it also used it for AI, sound travel & separating rooms so you could name them. What does NS2 use for those or are those not an issue?
That's a pretty useless thing to add to your level.
Just speculation, but you would likely fall out of the map and see either the Skybox or you'll have a Hall Of Mirrors effect (just like Gold Source) . After awhile of falling, I suspect that you would end up hitting the minimum height requirement by a level and the fall might kill you, but then again, it might not. You also might fall forever and ever until your client crashes.