Auto Visportal Script Challenge (SteveL ?)

[nbohr1more]

Objective: Create a crude visportal generator that will help new mappers or even speed-up veteran mappers work.

Not necessarily meant to replace proper visportal craft but to improve fundamental understanding. (It may also

lead to new discoveries if portals are placed in unexpected ways and result in unexpected performance gains?)

 

Per our previous discussion:

 

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/16059-pathtarget-testing-script-for-dr/

 

The general design would be as follows:

 

1) Create an AI path that represents a player walk-through of your map.

2) Have a script follow this path and crudely create visportals where visibility junctions seem natural

 

Bonus points for:

 

Weighing visportals verses draws and batching.

 

Possible assistance: have script parse a dmap for the unoptimized map?

 

Future project:

 

Some sort of AI pattern refinement version that looks for typical mapper portal placements and creates new rules based on these practices.

Maybe a random auto map generator that mappers can place portals into and the algorithm compares the results.

(LOL this is probably way too pie-in-the-sky, if the first challenge isn't...).

[SteveL]

Morning nbohr1more. When you mentioned this yesterday I thought "impossible". Now you've elaborated it a bit I see it probably isn't impossible... I'm still not sure whether it would be used though. Let's see what use cases people can think of.

 

The only way I can think that it might be implementable would be to trace the path and at each point find the closest wall. Extend a normal plane from that wall and see whether it can seal as a rectangle. At the end, choose the smallest sealing rectangles. There'd be maintenance needed unfortunately. I think the script would need to maintain a list of solid textures unless the python shell can access the engine path variables and the material files.

 

That script would seal doors but would be hopeless at most exteriors. I have absolutely no idea whether your bonus points are possible!

[nbohr1more]

I think any material without caulk, translucent, alpha, or nodraw keywords and only including worldspawn brushes would cover the requirements.

I presume since DR can see material details in the inspector that it's script interface can parse them?

 

Batching is detailed here:

 

http://www.iddevnet.com/quake4/LevelEditor_Performance

 

As for outdoor areas... I have a secondary idea... auto-generate func_portals at user defined cutoffs (draw calls over x, distance larger than x, etc)

then mappers can either paint flat textures on the func_portal patch or a cubemap. And while I'm going-off in la la land, if the script auto-placed

a dummy info_playerstart entity where the envshot would be taken for said cubemaps... well now we're really cooking.

 

Again, I think it would be helpful to have even a very crude implementation. It could act as a sanity check for complex geometry issues and as a tutorial

for new mappers.