Bikerdude: - questions

[Bikerdude]

guys i dont mean to be rude, but if this is gonna be an ongoing discussion can you start a new thread for it. Its hard enough trying to search for stuff I have asked about as it is

 

[Bikerdude]

Another question:

 

trying to get teleport to work on the player, followed the wiki article, but it refuses to work. I have attached a basic test map so maybe someone can see what I am doing wrong...

ExitTeleportTest.pk4.txt

[grayman]

trying to get teleport to work on the player ...

 

Here's how I do it ...

 

 

 

[Bikerdude]

ta.

 

is it possible to add a delay to the teleport..? (answered my own question, put a delay on the trigger etc)

[Bikerdude]

On the subject of teleport's, can we add an effect to the teleport..? in my case I want to soften the teleport process as in the view fades to black, then fades from black etc..?

 

bah, after all that work the sign text is interacting with the bloody sky box, in that some of the text goes 100% transparent depending on player viewpoint.

[grayman]

On the subject of teleport's, can we add an effect to the teleport..? in my case I want to soften the teleport process as in the view fades to black, then fades from black etc..?

 

I have fade to black, teleport, and fade back in working in my WIP.

 

It involves triggers and scripts, and if you don't have an answer from someone else by tonight, I'll put a package together and post it. (I'm trying to make a code delivery atm.)

[Bikerdude]

Ok cool. might not be doing it as the the little sign gui I put in has a weird transparency issue when then player can see the skybox behind it...

 

Another question:

 

whats the command that shows which surfaces have more than one light on them..? so i can try and optimize a bit further etc.

[Tels]

Ok cool. might not be doing it as the the little sign gui I put in has a weird transparency issue when then player can see the skybox behind it...

 

Another question:

 

whats the command that shows which surfaces have more than one light on them..? so i can try and optimize a bit further etc.

 

r_showLightCount 1

[Bikerdude]

ta.

 

Like the draw count, over 1500-2000 is considered bad, whats the same of the light count..?

[grayman]

Here's a test map with back and forth teleporters and fades.

 

The trigger entities call the script functions, which each call a couple of entities in the map.

 

Adjust delay and fade times to suit.

 

Adjust fade colors to suit.

 

When the map starts, step onto the platform in front of you.

 

 

 

[nbohr1more]

ta.

 

Like the draw count, over 1500-2000 is considered bad, whats the same of the light count..?

 

Lights per scene? I though that r_showLightCount shows light count "per surface".

 

The old belief was that you should not exceed 6 lights per surface but fog, blendlight, and ambient light counts can be much higher without too much detriment. Shadows are the primary problem so light overlaps for non-shadowed lights are much more forgiving. That said, every light overlap duplicates verts so you can get geometry bound with pretty blocky scenes if you go crazy with the lights.

 

 

~~~~~~

 

After studying the topic over and over again, this is the ideal setup (it's a pain in the ass though).

 

 

1) Setup you primary static shadowed lights

2) Create small rectangular "overbright" ambient light volumes close to surfaces for decorative lighting (using custom textures where necessary)

3) Create free-standing ambient volumes (or even regular no-shadow volumes) that don't touch the surfaces (levitating?) for subtle lighting effects on dynamic objects (AI, etc).

4) Cut your geometry to keep light counts down

 

Step 2 is essentially like putting a "blend add" stage in your material with a small light map texture but it's a little more flexible because you can move the volume relative to the surface.

 

Step 3, light volumes overlapping does not have a severe performance impact except when these overlaps hit geometry. Just be careful because if an AI passes through a boat-load of overlapping volumes you will feel those FPS melt away...

 

So that's the best o' the best "manual" way if you are a monk with a 1000 yrs to light a map.

 

The attached image shows:

 

A cave wall ortho view (BLACK)

A Projected Light shadowed (BLUE)

A decorative Ambient (RED)

A floating ambient (GREEN)

 

Illustrating the different placement scenarios above.

Edited May 24, 2011 by nbohr1more

[grayman]

Here's a test map with back and forth teleporters and fades.

 

Btw, the scripts in this case could be tossed and replaced by additional 'target' spawnargs in the triggers, if you want to simplify further. I left the scripts in to show how scripts could be involved. The original scripts were doing other stuff that I trimmed out because they were irrelevant to your question.

[Bikerdude]

Here's a test map with back and forth teleporters and fades.

 

Thanks Gman, your a little star!

[Bikerdude]

Ok, got a major problem that's gonna stop the release of my contest map. I had this with RTTC-V2 but it turned out to be a light source causing it on that occasion, and I have removed all the lights in the effected leaf bar the fog/ambient_world and Im still getting the issue.

 

I'm getting a black out/void issue when in-game, and by that I mean when looking in a given direction all the lights and textures in the players view become un-rendered. This issue dosen't happen right away either, the game can be running for about 5mins before it starts happening. The issue only effects one leaf, in this case its the outside leaf. The inside and forest sections are unaffected

 

Atm, I am just removing things from the effects leaf in an effort to pin down whats causing it.. but if I cant fix it I will be pulling out of the contest.

[grayman]

Are there visportals at or near the spot where this occurs?

 

When you say it happens after 5 mins, does that mean you stand in one place w/o moving and eventually things go dark, or do you mean that you walk through the area and have no problems, but when you come back later things have gone dark?

 

And what was it about the RttC2 light that caused the problem there?

[Bikerdude]

In RttcV2 there was a small store room with a single light inside (it was the room next to sykes kitchen) it had a weird triangle zone of black. It turned out to be a corrupt light entity that was causing it, so deleting and recreating fixed it.

 

In answer to your other question, you can be anywhere in the outside leaf but as soon as you looked in a certain direction I would get the black-out issue. But it will only manifest itself until after 5mins had passed..Im deleting entities in the small localized area trying to narrow down which one is causing it..

 

[update]

 

Well its looks like it was a single bloody light source, again...! i would like to know WTF causing this bollox, as quite frankly I have wasted fucking hours and hours because of it.

[Fidcal]

I know the feeling.

 

All I can suggest is you save a copy of the bad map for someone to look at in the future after the contest.

[Bikerdude]

the version the testers have still contains the aforementioned light source, so will pit a text entity above and attach it to a bug report.

[Bikerdude]

Another question

 

Is it possible to light/unlight candles and such via a frob or frob+script etc AKA T2 style...? I would really like to be able to put this in my maps

[Fidcal]

You can already pinch out candles by picking them up and pressing 'use'. To relight them you could use my slow match. I'll pm it if you want. But if you prefer to just frob a candle to light it then it needs some special script I guess. Plus it's non-standard so nobody will know. As a test you could try setting up a static candle model with a candle flame on top then make the candle frobable 1 and target the flame. I'm not sure if it will work though.

[Bikerdude]

Another question:

 

On the subject of the command " R_showtris 2" -

 

I have two leafs (outside/inside), both are sealed from each other, none of the free standing FS in the outside leaf is interacting with or protruding into the inside leaf. So why when I use the " r_showtris 2" command am I seeing items from the outside leaf when in the inside leaf.

 

I'm doing all this in an effort to reduce the drawcount, and I suspect that the above isse is adding a few hundred calls to the total pushing my map over the player friendly 1500 etc.

[Fidcal]

Does one leaf protrude into the other? I had an L shaped room with all beams one big func_static. Imagine the L room as a leg with a foot. That is one leaf inside not divided by a visportal. The door was on the shin with a visportal. Outside the corridor is another leaf. Even with the door shut the foot protruded into the outer leaf. All the beam tris showed outside. Solution was to divide the beams into two func_statics - one in the leg and one in the foot.

[Bikerdude]

Nope, the only way from the inside to outside is via doors and all these have VPs on them. And the FS I can see from the inside are quite away from the walls of the inside leaf, not protruding or touching.

[Fidcal]

No, the FS do not need to protrude out of the leaf. It may be the leaf that protrudes. the FS are fully within the leaf. But is the leaf irregular in shape? Is it a rectangle? An L shape? A U shape? An S shape?

[Bikerdude]

LOL, the outside leaf its a sort of O shaped, and the inside leaf is well a mixture as its a building etc.