Question about clusterportals

[Eraser]

Simple: do you need to put clusterportals in openings which have been clipped off with playerclip? In other words: are playerclips treated like (structural) brushes when determining clusters?

[Noruen]

Definitely yes. Playerclip, Weaponclip and Botclip. All can be used like "borders" for clusterportal brush.

So clipped areas doesn't need to be clusterportaled

[Eraser]

thx for the info. BSPC seems to detect the clusterportals correctly so it works out well this way. Thanks

[dONKEY]

You don't 'need' to put cluster portals anywhere. I always found cluster portal was one of those things I used when I ran into a bot navigation issue.

[Eraser]

It's not needed, I know, but I always understood that it's making things more efficient? The sample maps provided with radiant all are riddled with clusterportals as well.

[Noruen]

Much more efficient. You should create in your map clusters with same number of areas (200 is best). But BSPC without map optimising create always very unweighted clusters. Iny my map, clusterportals made unbelieveable change (it was better with).

[dONKEY]

Again, that's not necessarily true.
In a small map bot navigation is far more intelligent if the entire map is a single cluster.
In large maps that comprise of a single cluster you can end up with 'bot-stutter'.
Remember the sample maps also had odd hint brush placement as well.
IMO, getting rid of tiny clusters is more of an issue to bot navigation than creating clusters.

[Noruen]

Yes, but this is maybe case of 20 brush competition maps. In normla size maps we build here, it is very often necessary to separate map into clusters - as I said - in bspc documentation is ideal value of 200 areas per cluster.

But i don't want to flame here. I realized that really the less areas per cluster, the better botplay.

[Eraser]

Is the areas you're referring to this bit in the BSPC compile output?

cluster 1 has 96 reachability areas
cluster 2 has 5 reachability areas
cluster 3 has 23 reachability areas
cluster 4 has 55 reachability areas
cluster 5 has 8 reachability areas
cluster 6 has 12 reachability areas
cluster 7 has 23 reachability areas
cluster 8 has 63 reachability areas
cluster 9 has 6 reachability areas
cluster 10 has 34 reachability areas

My clusters appear to have relatively few areas then.

[Noruen]

Yes, that's it. There is maybe too much clusters with few areas. How is your botplay?

[Eraser]

Well, the bots do seem to traverse most of the map and do pick up all of the weapons/items (except the LG, but this is probably due to my odd jump platform stairs thing which I'm going to change). They do seem to prefer to always end up in one area though, so that's most of the time significantly more crowded than the rest of the map. But to be honest, I'm not exactly sure how to judge bot play.

Is there perhaps some way to identify which cluster is where? I could remove some clusterportals to merge the really small clusters into the larger ones, but then I'd have to know which cluster is where.

[Noruen]

of course

bot_testclusters 1 (it shows you area and cluster)
bot_testsolid 1 (it shows you some problems in map - where is SOLID and there should be some corridor, you shoudl fix it, bots can't go throuhght)

also, try to use item_botroam.

[sst13]

Sometimes bspc.exe is a little bit overzealous and creates a lot of small clusters. (Like Eraser posted)

Is there any way to prevent automatic cluster creation?

[Noruen]

Well, that's something I don't know, but I would like...

[dONKEY]

Noruen, again as you I am not flaming. I have produced a huge body of work, not just a single 20 brush map. Check my site, have even written a tutorial on bots, following on from Cardigans. You can't prevent cluster creation as such, but you can with tricks force clusters to be merged. In many but not all cases an entity that crosses clusters will force the clusters to merge. Also the use of multiple cluster portal brushes will confuse bspc into merging small clusters. Bottestclusters is your friend.

[^misantropia^]

Is there any way to prevent automatic cluster creation?

Apart from compiling with `-forcesidesvisible -optimize` not really. You could try adding `-nocsg` but that probably has little to no effect, it might even make things worse.

[dONKEY]

Just had a thought, something else to try if you have the time would be to use -fixaas. Building a separate very simplified bot only version of the map and using q3map2 to force it to be associated with the original bsp, as discussed by a13n and sock. On a side note I couldn't make this work without a13n's hex edit stage, which sock doesn't mention in his tutorial on his site.
I'm guessing a very simple bot map would be easier to control cluster creation than even the best clipped and portaled normal map.

[Eraser]

I just ran through my map with bot_testclusters enabled. BSPC said there are 11 clusters (1 - 11) but I ran into this tiny spot that shows cluster -16 in-game. Anyone know what's up with that?

edit:
oh, it looks like it shows negative cluster numbers when I'm standing inside a cluster portal brush.

[Noruen]

True It is normal. Every portal has weird number.