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Some Questions About Darkradiant


Bukary

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Dammit, well that's going to e a hell of a lot of extra work, trying to seal off the level wth a low sky like that. It'll be like doing a bloodly jigsaw puzzle.

Is the performace increase really significant as opposed to have not a single portal int he enitre level??.

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Would putting some caulk brushes inside the static meshes fix that problem?

 

No. There are no visblockers in D3 (unlike Q3), instead all occlusion is done purely through visportals.

 

Is the performace increase really significant as opposed to have not a single portal int he enitre level??.

 

Unless your level is tiny, you will suffer a very great performance lag if you use no visportals as the entire level will be rendered all the time.

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Dammit, well that's going to e a hell of a lot of extra work, trying to seal off the level wth a low sky like that. It'll be like doing a bloodly jigsaw puzzle.

Is the performace increase really significant as opposed to have not a single portal int he enitre level??.

 

I know :( I have to deal with it too - that's why I'm discussing the lod trees, cos otherwise it'd run too slow. Though I plan to have underwater caves, natural blockages etc to block views.

 

Hopefully DX10 will really improve performance of vid cards by 6-8x as Microsoft said. It does beg the question, why the fuck have we had to deal with bs directx's and this one comes out and pops performance to god knows where.

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Hopefully DX10 will really improve performance of vid cards by 6-8x as Microsoft said. It does beg the question, why the fuck have we had to deal with bs directx's and this one comes out and pops performance to god knows where.

 

It won't.

 

Not that it will affect Doom 3 which uses OpenGL not DirectX.

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Could you elaborate a bit more Orb? please?

 

OK. Close your eyes, and think back very hard to the last time a software update from Microsoft resulted in a 6-8x performance increase to something which is primarily hardware-based...

 

Anything? At all? Didn't think so.

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OK. Close your eyes, and think back very hard to the last time a software update from Microsoft resulted in a 6-8x performance increase to something which is primarily hardware-based...

 

Anything? At all? Didn't think so.

 

LOL, fair enough :laugh:

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Dammit, well that's going to e a hell of a lot of extra work, trying to seal off the level wth a low sky like that. It'll be like doing a bloodly jigsaw puzzle.

Is the performace increase really significant as opposed to have not a single portal int he enitre level??.

It's not so much work if you plan it that way from the beginning. When you think about what your city's going to look like, you eventually will also get used to thinking "Hm, what can I use there to visportal this complex section off nicely from everything else?", stuff like that.

 

It's almost like making everything into load zones. You don't want the entire city visible, just parts of it.

 

If you feel restricted, just play some old Thief 1 or 2 OMs or Deus Ex missions, to see what is possible with BSP engines even back then. You can really give the feel of "complex outside place" if you know what you're doing and learn a few tricks.

 

And you are right, sometimes it IS like a jigsaw puzzle. Welcome to BSP rendering :)

 

Unless your level is tiny, you will suffer a very great performance lag if you use no visportals as the entire level will be rendered all the time.
Ohhh that isn't even the half of it. Doom 3 uses visportals to cull other things too, like physics and lighting and probably some AI stuff too. You don't want the entire level running as if it is all in view at once...
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Unless your level is tiny, you will suffer a very great performance lag if you use no visportals as the entire level will be rendered all the time.

 

IMO this is not entirely true. If you have two completely unrelated rooms, which are only connected via teleporters the second room would not be rendered, as long as the player is on the other, right? Not that this doesn't help much, just trying to better understand the visportals. IMO visportals only help increase performance by giving hints to the renderengine as long as the rooms are directly connected with each other with brushes.

Gerhard

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IMO this is not entirely true. If you have two completely unrelated rooms, which are only connected via teleporters the second room would not be rendered, as long as the player is on the other, right? Not that this doesn't help much, just trying to better understand the visportals. IMO visportals only help increase performance by giving hints to the renderengine as long as the rooms are directly connected with each other with brushes.

 

Yeah ok, if parts of your level are unconnected then I think these will not be rendered (they will be considered separate portal zones due to their lack of connection).

 

This would only be relevant in a very small minority of maps I should think.

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How does the 'find leak spot' command work, because it isn't doing anything for me.

If you want to find leak point, just click File>Pointfile and follow the red line. :)

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It's the same solution as in DromEd.

 

Your city streets are actually tunnels. The ceiling of the tunnel is actually a skybox.

 

Your buildings don't all have to be the same height for this. The buildings are actually facades with varying heights, and the tunnel height is the height of the highest building.

 

Open up OMs in DromEd to see the tricks they used.

They did this in Thief 1. In Thief 2 they carved out one huge honkin' space and built the entire City within that. Not saying you should do that in DoomEd--definitely not saying that--just pointing out how they did it in Dromed 2.

 

In my own project my City has rooftop action and ground action. You have NO idea how hard that is to plan out until you actually attempt it. Rooftops that are fun to be on make for dull buildings on the ground (due to the need to restrict the line of sight mostly, but other reasons too). Interesting attractive buildings on the ground make rooftop action a lot less fun. Basically the best rooftops are on top of tall square buildings with wide flat roofs surrounded by even taller square buildings. VERY boring from the ground. I can't do the tunnel thing but settled for a City divided into rather large cubical segments with creative passageways from one to the next. I have to draw each one on paper (GRAPH paper I found out to my dismay) and pretty much spend days planning it out before I even begin to place a brush. Then usually I have to trash it and start all over from scratch.

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Yes - the levels were made by a variety of people working in LGS. Most of them are well done, but it's glaringly obvious which ones are well made and which ones are not.

 

I think ... the one where you have to blackmail someone, near the start in T2, can't remember the name of the level - that is one of the ones that starts with a huge air block that contains everything in it... dumb. Additive construction in a subtractive editor.

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Additive construction in a subtractive editor.
How funny! I never thought of it that way. But it's definitely easier to build that way than the tunnel method, MOST definitely easier to change and redesign as needed, and performance didn't seem to be an issue, did it? I don't see then why that was a bad decision. Seems anything else would have been stupid.

 

I am still struggling with DoomEd. Building anything is incredibly slow. I figure like anything it just takes getting used to, but gosh it was sooo easy to start building something in Dromed and I've been working with DoomEd for awhile and it's still a horrible, painstaking struggle. Since you brought up additive/subtractive has anyone ever tried the reverse in DoomEd? Start with a huge block of solid cheese and carve your level out of that?

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Since you brought up additive/subtractive has anyone ever tried the reverse in DoomEd? Start with a huge block of solid cheese and carve your level out of that?

 

Doom 3 uses pure-additive geometry. Carving rooms out of solid space is not even an option.

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but using DoomEd seemed quite easy to learn, IMO.
I'm not dissing DoomEd. I struggled with UnrealEd for quite some time before I finally gave up on it. I got totally sick of having to scooch my mouse around to get anywhere on the map for one thing, and if there's another way to do it, I never found out what it was. Thank god DoomEd lets you "teleport" around the map like Dromed does. Don't know what it was about Dromed but I was up and running and building stuff with that in no time. Seriously, I'm having a much easier time with DoomEd than I ever had in UnrealEd but it's still a struggle. Edited by Ratty
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I didn't think you were dissing Doomed, I just mentioned it. :)

 

I tried Dromed, but the reason I did not much with it, was not because it was so hard to learn, rather because I don't have the patience and skill to make a full blown map. :)

 

Actually I quite like Dromed, but maybe this is only the case BECAUSE I did not do enough work with it. :)

Gerhard

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How funny! I never thought of it that way. But it's definitely easier to build that way than the tunnel method, MOST definitely easier to change and redesign as needed, and performance didn't seem to be an issue, did it? I don't see then why that was a bad decision. Seems anything else would have been stupid.

 

I am still struggling with DoomEd. Building anything is incredibly slow. I figure like anything it just takes getting used to, but gosh it was sooo easy to start building something in Dromed and I've been working with DoomEd for awhile and it's still a horrible, painstaking struggle. Since you brought up additive/subtractive has anyone ever tried the reverse in DoomEd? Start with a huge block of solid cheese and carve your level out of that?

You have the wrong idea. No way of designing is better than another in the general sense. You design for the engine.

 

The DromEd editor is subtractive because that's the way Dark Engine makes it's optimisations.

 

The Doom 3 editor is additive because (with visportal placement) that's the way Doom 3 engine makes it's optimisations.

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I've been learning how to build outdoor locations in Radiant for the last few days. Here's my second "room" in Radiant:

 

bukmars14we.jpg

 

bukmars22gm.jpg

 

bukmars35hm.jpg

 

Almost everything is made from brushes and patches.

 

I was wondering how dangerous (free) rotated brushes and patches are. Should I avoid free rotation tool?

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Download Old Comrades, Old Debts FM or Mistrz Effects demo and see my old projects!

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I was wondering how dangerous (free) rotated brushes and patches are. Should I avoid free rotation tool?

 

Not at all. Welcome to the wonderful world of Doom 3 map design, where there is no such thing as a "BSP hole"*.

 

However, for "detail" brushes you may wish to convert them to func_static objects to save them from cutting up surfaces they are in contact with.

 

Wow! That looks pretty impressive. :)

 

Yes it is - a very stark contrast to the sort of things the Unforeseen Consequences lot were posting as their "just a few days with Radiant" screenshots...

 

*Actually, I have seen something a bit like a BSP hole when doing crazy vertex-editing of brushes, but this is not a good way to build anyway.

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