Using hint in big open maps

[richard.]

Hello everyone,

I am looking for some help with hint brushes.. The problem is, I read alot of the hint-tutorials on the internet, but one thing I still dont understand is in what way you use hint brushes when having a big, open map.
My plan was to make a big medieval city kind of map, and all turned well. But people with a bit older PC's do have rather big FPS-drops in it so I hope I can make it playable for them also.

Heres a picture of my .map without anything filtered, as you can see, I stamped it pretty full with details.





Now for one thing, I do not know if I made the right brushes structure and detail, but here is the map without entities, lights, patches and details:




If the pictures are to vague I can also post the .map file if needed.


So the problem is mainly that in the hint toturials, you often have nicely done halls, all closed with a roof, with not many
big height differences. My map do contain these height differences and very long lines of sight.

I hope someone can help me with this matter, since it's troubling me for a while now.

Sincerely,
Richard

[obsidian]

From the looks of your map, there really isn't much you can do with hints that will yield any kind of beneficial results. Hints help to hide stuff that are in other rooms that you can't see. Essentially, what you have here is just one really large room with a bunch of smaller stuff in it.

I'd convert those square brushes into detail as well, caulk as many unseen faces as possible and hope for the best.

[wattro]

if you post the map file, someone might be up to the challenge to see if there is anything in there that can be hinted.

you might be able to make a few gains here and there, but probably not a solution that works across the entire map.

[richard.]

At the moment I am currently busy with caulks, instead of caulking things I turned the whole map into caulk and I am texturing the faces you can see. I already came across a few useless brushes (:
If this doesn't work I will post my .map

[sock]

Here is a couple of suggestions:

* You need to create separate spaces first before you can hint/hide anything. If the player cannot get to the roof space, bring the sky brush lower. Bring it right down to the highest roof top.

* Create a basic shape of the roof outline as a structural brush.
* Create a brush which connects the roof tops to the sky. Paint it in sky texture.
* Try and organize the buildings in different angles and positions, not in one straight street design. Put a building in the center to break up visibility from one side of the map to the other.

Eventually you should end up with a load of columns (buildings) which you can hint brush like doorways. I would draw some screenshot example but got no access to a drawing program atm.

Sock

[dichtfux]

* Try and organize the buildings in different angles and positions, not in one straight street design. Put a building in the center to break up visibility from one side of the map to the other.

This will also avoid other LOS issues like predictable/boring gameplay, players doing nothing but spamming rockets/rail/plasma through that street etc.

[seremtan]

yeah, pretty much what sock said, though you can have stand-alone geometry so long as you completely cover it with a hint brush

tbh you really need to be thinking about visibility options and optimisation *before* you lay down a single brush. it should be an integral part of the map design process rather than something done at the end

unfortunately Q3 doesn't have many devices for optimisation (basically there's hint and z-plane clipping+fog and that's it). since this is a medieval village you might want to try the latter of those two option as well as the former, though it will restrict your skybox to whatever colour the fog is due to sky shader weirdness iirc

[a13n]

How about placing rectangularly crossed antiportal on every roof?
If I get it right, this will be equivalent to the roof touching the sky, hence nothing can be seen through there, resulting in least overdraw w/o any sort of technical hassle... unless you allow players to climb up there.

[seremtan]

antiportal?

also, if you can see the portal of a leaf, the whole leaf is drawn. putting "antiportals" on the roof won't work

[GONNAFISTYA]

tbh you really need to be thinking about visibility options and optimisation *before* you lay down a single brush. it should be an integral part of the map design process rather than something done at the end

I learned that the hard way. Can you say complete rebuild?

[obsidian]

z-plane clipping (aka foghull) will probably work best if you don't mind having fog in your map. It would probably look pretty cool and I would say this is an ideal situation.

a13n is sort of right on the use of antiportals even though his knowledge about them and suggested use is far from correct. His suggested use will result in HoM and it won't actually do anything useful. Q3Map2 antiportals are not some magical hint brush that hides everything behind it, it does not work like UT2004 antiportals. I'll probably write an article about the correct use of antiportals to supplement my hinting article, but want to consult a few people before I do. More on this in a bit...