[FM generic title loader screens]

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

[FM generic title loader screens]

I think it would look better with just the backdrop.

[Opinions on St. Lucia Demo]

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

[im interested in becoming : Beta Mapper]

I'm not sure there would be a point in putting visportals in the tavern(besides sound propagation)

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

[im interested in becoming : Beta Mapper]

oh so both windows and doors should have there own visportal?

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.

 

Do you think its possible to seal off my marketplace?

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.

[Can you use me as beta mapper?]

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.

[im interested in becoming : Beta Mapper]

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.

[im interested in becoming : Beta Mapper]

Actually, I had them very early, but I had to delete them when I was finding leaks that visportals were covering up the tutorials refers to this as 'internal bleeding'

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.

[im interested in becoming : Beta Mapper]

It is playable but fraps can't get good frames until I make visportals

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.

[Can you use me as beta mapper?]

@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).

[Can you use me as beta mapper?]

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.

[Can you use me as beta mapper?]

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).

[Can you use me as beta mapper?]

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).

[Can you use me as beta mapper?]

Here is some info about these commands.

[Can you use me as beta mapper?]

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?

[Can you use me as beta mapper?]

@Baal: I've changed a lot of the brushes to func_static with noshadows on. Hope it will run a bit better now. Did the same to the ropes outside.

I also reduced the radii of some of the lights.

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?

[Can you use me as beta mapper?]

So a big light will reduce framerate, even if it is in a small room?

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.

[Can you use me as beta mapper?]

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.

[The Dark Mod: Video Preview Of Gleeful's New Map.]

Here.

[Tweaks to Frob highlight]

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.

[Tweaks to Frob highlight]

Ok, I will experiment with this a little more. And I already did a test to illustrate the difference and posted a screenshot some posts ago (in case you didn't see it).

[The Almighty Grid]

They can definitely be not aligned.

Yes, but such a function could be added to the editor. I was wondering if the Doom engine requires patch vertices to be aligned to some grid. But I don't think that's the case (I'm still not sure though).

[Tweaks to Frob highlight]

Ok, thank you. Then it's not as restrictive as I thought.

 

So, what does everybody think about a new frob highlight? I think it would be very useful.

In case it's not clear what I propose: I want the highlight to actually light a surface through a shader that uses normals and specular. The difficult part would be to only let it effect dark surfaces and just highlight already lit ones.

[The Almighty Grid]

Congratulations. Patches can sometimes be very difficult to work with.

 

About my suggestion: There is one problem with it that I forgot. You can only align vertices to the grid. But if the editor had a function to snap one vertex to another that could work. I don't think patch vertices have to be aligned to the grid at all but I'm not sure about that. Does anybody know?

[The Almighty Grid]

That should work if you line up the adjacent control points of the patches and make sure they use the same number of subdivisions (if I'm not missing something here).