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There's plenty of info on the forums and the wiki about making outdoor environments game-ready, such as: - Wiki, "Performance: Essential Must-Knows" Wiki - Wiki, "Creating Large Complex Areas" Wiki - Wiki, "Seed" Wiki - Wiki, "City Street Visportal Tutorial" Wiki - Wiki, "LOD Bias" Wiki - Wiki, "Systematic Method for Adding Pathfinding to Uneven Terrain" Wiki - Forums: "Using LOD" Thread - Forums: "Easy Outdoors Recipe" Thread These articles look like they're written for forests and city streets, but not so much for buildings out in the wilderness with climbable roofs and inner courtyards. There's extra challenge in this because the whole thing could go downhill from some views like the rooftops without careful planning, so I'd like to collect what can be done for this kind of map in this thread. It would be great if you can think of extra techniques. Visportals Map design Location system LOD (Level-of-Detail) Fog .ase models SEED Misc

I have a problem with my map where I created a glass frame around the door and by putting visportal in the door it obviously blocks the light coming from the room. Is there any way to make visportals act to the glass differently? By letting the light out?

Hey, Currently, my map WIP is yet to be visportaled (which I will do), however I've noticed something I like in the basement. I know visportals cut sound, however the floor above the basement is a wood floor AI will be walking on. IRL, you would hear the footsteps of anyone on the floor above the basement ceiling (underside of floor above), so I'd like to hear their footsteps, but not their voices. Is this possible using Visportals or some other way? It's the only area where it would make sense to hear footsteps on the floor directly above the player, however if I understand visportals correctly, if I place one on the stairs dividing both floors, it will kill the sound of both footsteps of AI and their voices. Is this correct? Is there a way to have just the footsteps? If I understand correctly, if I place just one visportal on the stairs, and then visportal all doors (or double visportal each side) entering the corridor above, then the sound from the corridor should transmit to the basement, but sound in any rooms will not, correct? Here's a pic. Thanks Ven

Hey, Every time I've try to use the Full Editor when PM'ing someone, and every single time I get an error. Whoever is in charge of the forum, is it possible that this could be fixed? Thanks Neon

I am quite far with my first map and I am placing some visportals now. When you play the map, everything outside is rendered. The inside of the big building I placed somewhere is not rendered, thanks to a visportal. So it seems like visportals work pretty good with doors. But I also made a tunnel, which is reached after using a button, which opens then "sarcophagus_lid.lwo" with a slide animation. The visportal i placed there is not working as intended. Everytime I face the visportal it is green (r_showportals 1) and only gets red when I don't look at it, which is weird for me, because on normal doors it behaves a different way (It is red until opened). In the picture you can see two visportals working perfectly, while the green one is the visportal mentioned above. What am I doing wrong? How can I make the visportal behave like it does on doors? EDIT: I somehow forgot the question about lights. Here it is: I made a room with a beam at the top half of the room. It is possible to walk on that beam and there is no light on it. But I placed some lamps/lights right under the beam. Now the light and shadow looks pretty weird:

Moved from the VP discussion in the Invisible Brush of Death thread: Interesting links as always nb. I’d not heard of antiportals before and I’ve only been studying the code since Monday but here’s my twopenceworth anyway. I think you’d need to keep track of a separate system of occluded frustums to go with the current system of view frustums. You can’t just slice parts out of the current frustums without ending up with complicated concave 3d shapes. Right now a view frustum is good for one whole visleaf, and the cross-section is always a convex polygon, which makes the number crunching easy. So you’d want a separate list of anti-view frustums, and surfaces would get checked multiple times: once for each current view frustum for that visleaf (you only get >1 where >1 open portals look on a visleaf) and once against each “anti” frustum generated by an antiportal. Time to play devil’s advocate though: why would we need them? I reckon the examples in those posts could be handled well by the existing system. In the first link, there's a boxed-in room and a long hill that hides a forest behind it. The box room is a non-issue for us, there's no need to do anything special. Just make sure the walls seal and plug the door with a VP. The hill is more interesting, but the normal portalling system still applies, just on a bigger scale.. Put a caulk wall inside your hill and top it with a VP that extends up to the skybox. So the forest ends up in a different visleaf. That VP will always be open when the player looks in that direction, but the forest won't be in the view frustum when the player looks through it from ground level. They'll just see skybox. Now the forest will get checked to see whether it's in the view frustum, but I can't see that antiportals would help with that. The forest would need checking anyway to see whether it's in the occluded zone. In the second article, the counter blocks the view between two doorways. Again, it can have a caulk wall in it and a VP above and to the side to cut the room into 2 visleafs. The poster gives that solution himself but mentions it as a pain. I'm not sure why though: it's an efficient solution using just 3 brushes and it's easy to do. One interesting thing I've learned while looking into this bug: a VP doesn't need to be closed to give a lot of benefit. A closed VP means the area behind it doesn’t need checking at all. An open VP means what’s behind it gets checked to see if it’s in line of sight, but the VP will still prevent anything that isn’t in LOS from sending any light/surface interactions to the back-end renderer. Here’s what the above example looks like with the central VP missing: With the VP, a single slice of the visleaf behind portal 2 generates interactions. Without it, the whole room does, and it’s left to the back-end with its more expensive, more precise algorithms to decide what’s really in view and what isn’t.

I'm wondering if anyone ever checks new posts in the Fan Missions Forums? I've posted 4 questions asking for help for 4 different missions that I can't finish because I"m stuck, and I don't get any help. I posted a question this morning so I don't expect an answer right away for that one. Its frustrating because I would like to finish them. I've read through the posts for each mission and I'm not getting anything from them. If there's someone who could help me I'd really appreciate it. Thanks I guess I'm spoiled from the TTLG forums.