Skaruts

For example, when you're monster_cliping some part of your map there's no point having that filter on until you're finished. Meanwhile this helps navigating the 3D view and you can also see how things look more clearly in that view. That's one example that stuck to my mind since recently, as I was watching Springheel's speed mapping videos, and at some point he expressed his annoyance at that. That was also when I thought I could try to tackle this again too. Also the visportals, as OrbWeaver mentioned, among others. Yea, I figured the translucency would be hacky. I never intended this to be a definite solution, though, since the ideal one would always be if DR supported it. It's more like a next best thing, I guess. That this creates extra geometry is indeed a bit of a set back. It's ok while building the maps, but then you only have have a sense of the real performance whenever you remove it... I don't know how annoying that may become. I never get to that point with my maps...

I don't, but it's ok. I wasn't the one with the issue, I just managed to replicate it. I'm not really making any FMs at the moment either, so...

Yup. It does.

Can't the unnecessary geometry become a bit of an issue, though, in dmap times or at runtime? Especially if stairs are detailed?

That's how I managed to. In a 256x256 room (128 high). There's two sets of stairs in the map, to the left of player start is the one I managed to fix before, and to the right is the original one with the problem. stairs.map.txt EDIT: I just made it solid 0 and looked at it from the inside, and doesn't seem like there's any faces facing inward. Someone mentioned this before, and I was wondering.

Just for the record, maybe the other setups work too, I only tried that one. The reasoning was just that separating each part of the staircase in its own func_static that makes the engine calculate their geometry separately, making it cleaner and without each part interfering with each other (or the walls/floors). Since excessive geometry seemed to be the problem, I though that would be the way to go. Though, as far as I know, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, anything that isn't sealing geometry should always be func_static anyway.

I'm currently adapting my textures to it. I found a little slight problem with the text of some of the back ones showing up in front of the text of some of the front ones, but that may be down to adjustments in the alpha channels. I'm gonna play around with it. It's probably not a big deal, though.

Yea, it works now. To be honest I'm still not happy about it though. The transparency brightens the back ones a bit too much for my taste (this was one of the problems I had with other blend modes). I juxtaposed yours and mine for comparison: I'm not sure that that's a big problem in practice, but... personally I rather not have it. My shadow material needs some fixing though.

I just recreated the staircase, and found it actually somewhat easy to get the same problem, and I think it's related to excessive geometry cuts, although probably still caused by a bug. As I made the walls longer/shorter I got different results (or no bad results in some cases), one time it affected the wall where some tris had different lighting, another time the wall had a black triangle, and then I got the exact same problem as the OP, in the staircase itself. All the problems with walls could be solved by making the staircase into a func_static, but the last one couldn't. The way I solved that one this case, that you might want to try, was by using rich_is_bored's 3rd setup (with a slight difference, but may be irrelevant -- see in spoiler below), and by making three func_statics out of it: - one for all the boards - one for both the big ramp and the big block - one for all the leftover triangle-steps below the boards.

I'm not sure that makes a difference. What I mean is that, looking at the last screenshot you showed, the engine cuts the geometry below all the steps in one way, but for some reason it does it differently on just that one step.

Not just that, it's not cutting triangles below the step (the wooden board), as it does below all the others. That empty triangle should be 3 triangles.

So that was the one... I figured there had to be a way to do it using alpha. Seems like you had the same problem with extra geometry too. Putting it into a .pk4 is a good idea, though. Could've done that myself. Though they will be overridden if the user has unpacked these files to folders. Thanks. I'll still be using my own textures, as I rather have those lines on some of them (and a bit more translucency), among a few other things, but this was nice to know. EDIT: Noticed a problem, though: some textures are invisible behind some others. (Not just behind monster clip, most of the tall brushes have faces invisible behind the adjacent ones.) (The bright strip below the monster clip is normal though, it's just a different wooden floor I have there.)

@Zen3001, could you share the map? (question for others: should he share both the .map and .darkradiant, or is just one of them enough?) Could you maybe also share your dmap log for comparison? (to get the dmap log in a text file use the console command clear first (to get rid of unnecessary garbage), then dmap your map, then do condump dmaplog.txt. Then share the content of dmaplog.txt -- dmaplog.txt is an arbitrary name, you can call it whatever you want. You can check the condump command here, near the bottom.)

Hardly anyone respects speed limits, that's my point. It's only where they have radars or something. Yea, human trafficking is actually a broader problem, indeed. As for bicycles, they're forbidden to circulate on the road here (anything that doesn't have a number plate is). Yet there's still plenty of them doing it. The cops don't really do anything. And it's annoying. They could go on the freakin sidewalk, like I do, but they don't!

It's true that they're made under that assumption, but I didn't argue that that wasn't the case. I said the result that can be observed over and over is that people will find ways around laws/regulations/taxation/etc. They're made under that assumption, but that assumption is wrong. A good way to visualize this is with prohibitions (leaving the rest aside for a moment). What determines how effective a prohibition is, is the amount of demand that there is for what was made illegal. There's an inverse correlation there, the more demand, the less effective the prohibition is. You can see it with drugs. They're illegal, and yet so many people still take drugs. In fact, many will take drugs because it's illegal. That was my case and of many of my peers. It's a lesson that should've been learned 100 years ago in the Prohibition Era. When they made alcohol illegal they created Gangsters (and inflated crime rates). The reason for this is because most people wanted alcohol, and criminalizing something people want, only has the effect of moving it to the black market where people can still get it. When they made alcohol legal again, most Gangsters disappeared (very few turned to drugs) because people will rather buy from the store legally. Gangsters were essentially out of business then. The war on drugs today solves nothing, and inflates crime rates (and gang violence). I suspect if drugs (all of them) became legal everywhere, cartels in mexico would be mostly out of business, street gang kids would have to get jobs, etc. Well, prostitution would have to be legalized too, and pimps would have to get jobs as well. Meanwhile, crime rates would drop, because there would less shootings, less beatings, less human-trafficking, etc etc. Essentially the same outcome they saw when they legalized alcohol 100 years ago. With taxation is the same thing. In my country the gov had the bright idea of taxing tobacco, more and more over time. When the price started becoming too much of a problem most people didn't stop smoking, they started buying larger boxes of tobacco (for manual tubing), because they're much cheaper. That's how things stand currently. Last year they decided to start heavily taxing sugary beverages (Coke, Pepsi, etc) -- of course, the consumers pay the taxes, not the companies. There's plenty of loopholes out there for people to not pay taxes. People are always coming up with more. No one who's conscious of it likes to be forced to comply to something they don't agree with. And then there's the example I gave about regulations and how companies ran away from them. Speed limits is another good example of a useless regulation. A lot of people probably don't even know the limit of the street they live in. Guns is a good example too. All around europe it's way easier for a criminal to buy a gun than it is for a law-abiding citizen. The former buys it, period. The latter has to get licensing, go through bureaucracies, maybe even do some tests for mental stability, and so on. Regulations around guns only serve to keep law-abiding citizens unarmed.