Disappearing Worldspawn

[stumpy]

are there any windings errors in the compile.

[Airship Ballet]

I've been mapping for a fair while, well, not as long as Quake but since CS 1.6 at least, and I haven't encountered problems with thin void walls. I tend to overlap them at the corners just to be sure but in general it's fairly clean. The disappearing brushes have made it a lot messier but there were no problems with light/sound leaking or visportals not working.

 

Oh well, like I said I'm too busy and/or lazy to fix what I've done, but I'll bear it in mind and make the walls thicker to be sure, thanks.

 

From what I saw in the room in question, if so, Nemo is cooked! From what I saw of other rooms, if so, Nemo is gutted... :/ Either way it all looked pretty cool. Thanks!

 

No Nemo to be found, it's just a placeholder name (Latin for Nobody). This is Nemo2 because my other is Nemo1. I haven't thought of names for either yet, basically.

 

are there any windings errors in the compile.

 

Not that I can see.

Edited March 18, 2014 by Airship Ballet

[Lux]

That's interesting because in Hammer, editing for CS1.6, walls had to be 16 units thick or else players could shoot through them. Granted those are Hammer units but a 16 unit wall in Hammer is about an 8 unit wall in DR.

[Airship Ballet]

Uh-huh, and you wanted the vast majority to allow themselves to be shot through. With Hammer I used surface properties rather than brush thickness to determine stuff like that. Thin walls are just a force of habit for me, and has never been an issue provided I keep them all aligned.

Edited March 18, 2014 by Airship Ballet

[Airship Ballet]

I went back and re-made the worldspawn walls for the bar in another map, then copied over all the content (without messing with textures or anything since it's a test) and I'm still having the issue. The only worldspawn in the map is the 8-thick walls and the rest has been made into func_statics. Absolutely no worldspawn is intersecting and there's not a single pixel outside the boundary walls. It's just one air-tight room with the content from the original bar. The only things inside the bar are worldspawn gone static and models spawned in from the editor, as well as some ragdolls, loot and lights. Blue rooms are gone, every brush is snapped to the grid, and so as far as I can tell it's all as vanilla as can be without just being a worldspawn block. Any ideas? I'm stumped--though that's not hard to accomplish--having used the process of elimination by deleting elements and come up empty.

 

Video

Edited March 19, 2014 by Airship Ballet

[RJFerret]

Erm, um, well, same solution as before, snapping to grid let them render.

 

(The video only half played for me, but what I saw not rendering were two angled supports on the wall behind the player at start in a "V". Note, there was a duplicate func_static over them that I removed to no affect.)

 

It looks like you rotated the brushes, then didn't snap to grid. Odds are rotations will take points off grid. One way to avoid that, although it obviously changes the width, is instead of rotating, hit v to edit the points, and drag them on axis. That way they stay on grid. If your beam gets objectionably narrow, highlight the two lower points and drag them down (or upper, up). This way you don't have to ctrl-g and risk things snapping in bad directions.

 

PS: FYI, generally func_statics on opposite sides of a room aren't combined. From my understanding, gladly corrected by any reader with better info, generally combine only one wall's details into func_static, otherwise drawcalls are increased for each light hitting any part elsewhere. So in that space, five, one for each wall, and the ceiling separately.

[Airship Ballet]

Yeah, I should mention that I did snap things to grid just experimentally and the issue was still there. There seems to be no correlation between what's on-grid and what's disappearing, which is a nuisance. I've been doing all the trims into statics one wall at a time, I just rushed it here for the sake of testing it.

[RJFerret]

BTW, when I was doing my first map, I learned this whole keep on the grid thing the hard way too, and had a forum post or two venting about it.

 

Another thing to watch out for with your "V" shaped support beams, if you use the Clipper tool to cut off the overlapping z-fighting parts at the top of the horizontal beam, that would take the vertices off grid (as the intersections of the angles aren't at a grid point typically). So gotta' remember to snap those back on grid, which is more subtle, as you aren't as obviously moving things off grid like with rotating.

[RJFerret]

Yeah, I should mention that I did snap things to grid just experimentally and the issue was still there.

 

This might be tricky...

 

A func_static or model just snaps it's origin to grid from first selection. You have to tab through. I find it easiest to snap as worldspawn, as it's less clicks.

 

If you are in vector editing mode, snapping will do nothing in my experience unless you have verts selected.

 

I often zoom in to be sure I see something move if I ctrl-g. I've found it easier to try to work with methods that always stay on grid to begin with, rather than opening the can of worms. (No CSG subtract, and only using Clipper on grid aligned stuff or 45°s on grid, no resizing afterward.)

 

In this case, those V beams noticeably thickened when I snapped to grid, which shows they weren't on grid to begin with, or they wouldn't have changed.

 

I agree, it's lousy use feedback, as if something is on grid, nothing appears to happen, and if the selection mode is such that nothing happens, nothing appears to happen as well. :/

 

PS: There wasn't a duplicate func_static previously, my mistake, was decals.

Edited March 19, 2014 by RJFerret

[Airship Ballet]

Probably subtracting that's done it. Might be an idea to mention that CSG is latin for Destroyer of Worlds. Also by snapping to grid experimentally I mean I made a mess of the room by doing it bit by bit and not tidying it up, so it was all blocky. They still did it, so I'm guessing it's just been a result of snipping chunks out of worldspawn.

Edited March 19, 2014 by Airship Ballet

[RJFerret]

Oh, and looking at those decals further, that's something else that might be tripping you up, typically those are done with decal patches instead of worldspawn. (Menu in brushes, "Create Decal Patches", which I made ctrl-shift-p since I already have ctrl-shift depressed for selecting the face to apply them to.) That way they only have one face among other benefits.

[Airship Ballet]

Just been creating decals from faces of the walls they're meant to be on. That button's existence is a huge red herring if it's actually a bad way to do it.

[Airship Ballet]

Oh well, gonna see what I can do. Thanks for the advice.

[RJFerret]

After downloading the video, I saw the missing stuff in the bar itself. Again, just off grid stuff, I snapped to grid and voilà.

 

Yet another thought (sorry to be trickling out of my brain today), the bar itself you might want to leave worldspawn, AI don't see func_statics in pathing, so get hung up on them, putting monsterclip around is kind of redundant to just having it be worldspawn to begin with.

 

The bar in InnBiz I had the base and top be worldspawn, all the tchotchkes on top were models/entities, while the trim was func_static, solid 0 and noshadows 1.

[RJFerret]

You are welcome, and once over the hump of the nuances of working this way, you'll fly through creating stuff with ease I'm sure! :-)