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Visportal questions


brethren

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This is a topic that's been perplexing me a bit. Reading thru the wiki, it sounds like visportals are more than recommended, they're a necessity. I understand basically how they work. But, in large, open, outside areas, it seems almost impossible to construct them in a working manner.

 

Picture a large canyon level, or maybe a city rooftops mission, where there is open sky at the top of your map. How do you "close off' these large areas so that all the visportals you set up cannot see each other? They seem designed primarily for tight spaces and corridor type maps. Maybe I'm misunderstanding how they work, but as I understand it, there ideally should be no path from the player to more than a couple of visportals at any given time.

 

Or, are they not even necessary, as long as your mission isn't overly large?

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You are correct that they are a necessity. They're basically used like Thief's room brushes for TDM sound prop (in addition to the vis benefits they give). And yep, though it depends on the area, if large and open, they are often needed less if at all. In the canyon example, proper outdoor soundprop wouldn't have to be precise, because you can figure the AI would hear it regardless of if there's direct path from sound to AI, just by passing around in open space. On the visual optimization side of things, they can still be of benefit in large areas, but you can't just take for granted that there will be benefit -- portal calculations come with performance cost, and allowing too many portals to "see each other" can actually hurt performance more than it helps.

 

The not-so-helpful but honest answer is, you kinda have to try it out and see what works.

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This is a topic that's been perplexing me a bit.
You're not the only one. :)

 

Picture a large canyon level, or maybe a city rooftops mission, where there is open sky at the top of your map. How do you "close off' these large areas so that all the visportals you set up cannot see each other? They seem designed primarily for tight spaces and corridor type maps.
It depends on how open the map is. If the player can access these roofs it will become difficult (not necessarily impossible). That's why you should built city streets like corridors (houses on the sides and a skyportal on top).

If you want to get on the roofs you have to restrict the view. But that depends on the complexity of the architecture and the hardware. It's difficult to explain this without a concrete example.

 

And here's another article on the subject:

iddevnet- visportals

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I've found if you're building a grid-like system of streets, you can have angled roofs that go into the skyportal. The player can still walk on the bottom half of the roof, they can even walk *around* it to the other side. The only thing they can't do is go over the top to the other side. But in-game I found it doesn't really feel unnatural; it just holds you back when you try, so it feels like the roof gets too steep there. Since there's another more obvious way around anyway, most people might not even notice. And it doesn't look unnatural from the ground or the roof, either. And then you can visportal all those streets.

 

Edit: I've been using it for my streets; the 2nd shot here is a good example.

 

Edit2: The other thing I notice from those screenshots is using things like awnings or canopies below the main roof that you can still walk on, so you can close the street with the roof but still get some z-axis mobility.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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Visportaling large outdoor areas can be kinda tough, especially if your outdoor area isn't quite built like hallways.

 

If its a canyon, I imagine it still resembles a hallway, just a really large one. Where the tops of the walls end, close that off with a visportal. dmap and see if it shows up (I forget the console command, is it show_portals 1?). The key is to make the visportal closed.

 

Heres an illustration, I hope this helps.

 

post-2207-1241030222_thumb.jpg

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happycheeze.deviantart.com

 

Moddb

 

Gamers Outreach, a nonprofit that uses videogames to raise money for chairty.

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"r_showportals 1"

 

It's also useful because it outlines in green the portals to areas that it thinks are visible, and it outlines in red the portals to areas it thinks the player can't see. It's great for experimentation, and you can go into finished maps and look at how they're visportaled for examples if you're stuck.

 

My pgup key is even bound to "toggle r_showportals"

yay seuss crease touss dome in ouss nose tair

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