Baal

Whats the error message (on the console)? Did you seal your map with 6 big walls around the whole?

I'm still working on that frob highlight shader I mentioned some time ago. That could also help with the issue (if I can get it to work without source code modifications).

You should delete the big brushes around the map. They cause a lot of unnecessary space and geometry. Seal the streets off with skyportal brushes instead.

That was cool. I really like the thieves hideout. And performance was good too. But I think it needs more visportals for better sound propagation. If you don't set them up right AI could hear you when you don't expect it, through a thick wall for example. Read the wiki article about sound propagation. The street area should be visportaled too because performance (and sound) will become a problem when it grows bigger. Keep working on it. It's very good already.

Nice. Some small things I noticed: The texture on the railing in the second screenshot absolutely doesn't fit its architecture. The brick texture could be scaled a little smaller. And to keep it from getting repetitive you can divide the facades of the buildings so that they aren't just flat walls with windows on them.

I like that. The mission title could be placed above the skyline and the text beneath (with enough space for longer titles).

I think it would look better with just the backdrop.

Do you have the file "devil.dll" in your doom 3 directory?

Visportals are automatically opened and closed by their door entity (a closed door deactivates a portal even if it is in the players view).They are also closed when they are outside the view (when the player has its back turned to the tavern, for example). You can keep the tavern but you can consider closing the windows to limit the view. (EDIT: Thats what you meant. I missread something.) Have you read the wiki articles about visportals and performance? You should really try to fully understand visportals. Here's an article from ids site: iddevnet - visportals

They don't have to but visportals should be as small as possible. Other portals that are visible through a portal (from your point of view) are also active and cause the area they lead to to also be rendered. The smaller their area on the screen the better. It's hard to tell from the screenshots but it doesn't look that complicated, so yes, it should be possible. Maybe just one big portal on top of it and a portal for every gate or alley leading outside.

I just tried it and it runs much better. It's playable with good framerates on my OLD system now. But I think you removed more details than necessary. You can make single areas pretty detailed as long as you make sure that not to many of them are rendered at once. I noticed a spot where you use a noshadows light on a wall with a volume reaching into the room on the other side (outside the cabin with a bed, a candle, some loot and a guard). It's not noticable in this case but it will light up both sides of the wall. You have to make it cast shadows or adjust its light volume to prevent that. If it's a static light that won't be to bad for performance (I think). EDIT: The hull patches are rendered even when inside but I'm not sure what could be done about it and it's not that bad.

r_showportals only shows functional portals. If they are not correctly placed in the editor there is no visportal that this command would display. Try to begin with a simple situation, like a room, and close it of from the rest of the map by putting portals in the windows and doors. If ALL these are set up correctly and the room is otherwise sealed it will be a seperate vis area and the portals should show up green/red with r_showportals.

It's sometimes not obvious why a portal doesn't work. Did you try the leak test as described on the wiki?Also, the edges of a visportal surface must not be in the "void" and have to match up to or be enclosed in solid brushes.

This is something that every mapper should know from the beginning. Try to visportal your map as early as possible! It is difficult, especially in open areas, but very important as they are used for sound propagation and rendering. Your map looks good. When you're ready you can have us a look at the map in game.

@Jesps: You should seal everything beneath the deck level and outside the ship from pathfinding with monsterclip. The outside of the hull (beneath the patch) is pretty complicated. And maybe building the actual hull isn't necessary because the player never sees it (if you can keep him/her on the ship).

I did an experiment and made the floor brush of the starting area much thicker (so that the lantern light volume doesn't extend outside of it) and this prevents the performance drop.

Performance: Essential Must-Knows This tutorial describes a method to find internal leaks out of visportal areas (similar to what Flanders wrote). Does anybody else have the problem I described? The starting room is sealed and the visportals work. But moving lightsources like the lantern totally kill performance on my system (from ~60 down to ~10 FPS when I activate it or move the candle there).

This can happen when you convert brushes to func_statics because they don't seal. And another thing: you can convert the beams together with their small top parts to a single object (or even all of the beams of a room).

Here is some info about these commands.

I never had such a huge drop in performance with the lantern before so I don't know why it's so bad inside. Outside may be a different problem. Setting up visportals efficiently is difficult in open areas. You can check visportals with the commands "r_showportals", "r_usescissors" and "r_showtris". Do you know how these work?

Unfortunately that didn't help much. In the starting area, for example, I have very high framerates (40-60 FPS) but as soon as I activate the lantern it drops to 10 or less FPS (even when I deleted most of the objects in this room). Does anybody know why that is?

The shadow volume it casts has to be computed for all architecture contained in its radius (or at least everything that is reachable through visportals, if I understand this correctly). And that's very CPU intensive.

That looks very good. But performance is very bad on my system (inside the ship, where my old hardware should be sufficient). The problem seems to be that there is a lot of detail that doesn't need to be worldspawn brushes and should be converted to func_static. The wooden beams on the hull, for example, result in a lot of triangles and don't need to cast a shadow ("noshadows" on a func_static). There are also some lights with a very big light radius that extend way beyond the small area they affect (I'm not sure how bad this is for performance but I can't think of another reason for the lag). Regarding the beta mapper status: I'm not a team member but I think the fact that you released a mission for Thief doesn't hurt your chances.

Here.

The screenshot above shows the current highlight (right) and my highlight test (left) of an item that is almost black unfrobbed. But I have to do some work on that and test all the possible lighting situations before I can show something real.