.Map :: MoHAA Mapping

I've been working with this stuff for a few months so I understand how to do it. But the very presence of ManVis messes things up. I'll try to keep this brief.

Originally, I had No manvis, only some area portals and I compiled with a blocksize of 0. That works perfectly, but I want to boost the FPS if I can.

Using large cubes of Vis brushes, I have blocked out large areas that I want turned off when I am in a target cube. This is also working correctly. Here is the problem:

Two large areas of my map that do not even have manvis cubes have popping visibility. Specifically, I am standing in an open area of the map. I am NOT inside a Vis cube. And I am looking at the other side of the open area which is also NOT inside a vis cube. But most of the brushes in the direction I am looking do not draw. If I switch positions and look the other way. The other side draws correctly.

I've tried using blocksizes of 0, 768, 1024, and 2048. All this does is make more areas pop that were not popping before.

Is there a way to use man Vis so that it forces an area to draw instead of not draw? Or would you use an extremely large hint brush to do that? I prefer not to use a hint brush if I can avoid it.

Two things I've learned about them:
1. Lots of Hint brushes slow your Vis step down tremendously.
2. The "-nohint" compile option doesn't work worth a damn so don't bother.


Anyway. IF anyone has any suggestions I'm all ears. A small boost in FPS isnt' worth all this grief. The map runs pretty well as is. But hi-res textures on a low-res machine would kill you.

Well, Se?or do you have a farplane set? Also if you put a leafgroup (vis cube) where the poppers are happening have them target stuff that can't be seen, then it should be drawn. I had the same problem and that fixed it for me.

i thogut u had to have the whole map in a vis group if u were going to use one, i didnt know u could leave parts out of them.

Don't use blocksize, just go with the default (128 I think)--you are confusing the vis compiler. Also I think you may be looking at vis_leafgroups backwards. If you stand in a vis_leafgroup, any vis_leafgroup it targets will not be drawn. If you want, you can have them target eachother, but it is not required. Also, any brush that is not fully inside the targeted vis_leafgroup, will not vanish.

Area portals are great because they can make a windowless room act just like vis_leafgroups. When you stand inside the room with the portals closed (doors shut), everything outside the room is not drawn.

I am using my vis_leafgroups in the proper manner - to turn off brushes in the targeted area that cannot be seen anyway. But when those 2 problem areas disappear, I am not standing inside nor anywhere near a targeting leafgroup.

I am convinced the blocksize is giving me my problems. It looks like the areas disappear as I cross a 1024 grid boundary. That's why I have been trying different values. I thought default blocksize was 1024. But, It was recommended in the compile options Tut to set it to "0". I figured that would prevent the blocks from being calculated into the vis but apparently it does not behave correctly when vis_leafgroups are present.

I'll try a blocksize of 128 first. And then I'll remove the option and see what happens.


I am using area portals in my windowless rooms and they are working great. This particular problem happens when I leave the top floor of a building and go onto a balcony. If I look left or right, several brushes that can easily be seen disappear. but if I move just a little bit, they will come back on.


Blue6007:
I tried your suggestion and put a vis_leafgroup in the area that didn't have one and I targeted it to an obscure vis_leafgroup on the other side of the map. But that did not stop the areas right next to me from disappearing. In fact, it made more holes in my vis than what I had before.






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ewww , thats not good, sorry that didn't work...

Have you tried vis_derived/1 in your worldspawn settings?

I tried it a few months ago. I don't have manual vis covering every surface so that just made the holes even worse.

Now that I think of it, I did have a problem similar to yours. After putting in vis_leafgroups a large elevator would vanish and reappear as it moved up and down its shaft. I tried all kinds of thing to make it stop doing that, but nothing worked. So, I ended up giving it key/value, alwaysdraw/1. That fixed it, but of course it was drawn all the time--no matter what man vis I used.

In the immortal words of dorky Anakin Skywalker:

"It's Working! IT'S WORKING!"

1: I noticed that I still had the "-nohint" flag in my compile even though I am no longer using hint brushes. I don't think that was the problem, though.

2: I set my blocksize to 128. I didn't get to play through everything, but the areas I was most concerned with do not pop anymore. I didn't get to try the compile without a specified blocksize to see if the default would work. But I probably won't bother.