Doors that block vis without an Area Portal?

[Quack]

I understand how Area Portals and doors work. I got a room to hide the outside when the doors close and vis versa. From what I understand, if the room is not sealed then the doors won't block vis when closed. The area has to be completely sealed off for the area portal to turn on/off. Originally, I designed the map so that the doors would block visibility. My problem is that I have multiple rooms that are open to the same connecting area so all of the doors/areas won't work with area portals. Other than aesthetics, they might as well not be there. I was wondering if there is some kind of trick or new feature in q3map2 or maybe some way of manually editing the area portals. I thought I found a solution, it seems that nodraw non-solid successfully "seals" an area, the problem is that when the portal closes, you get HOM effect. Without area portals and proper placement of hint brushes, I believe that it would be possible to reduce tris enough to make it playable with like 15 or 20 people fighting. Although, any alternative would be greatly appreciated, not to mention the Triangle God would be eternally grateful for saving thousands of his children.

[g0th-]

I'm not really good on q3 tech but from what I remembered you just have to but a hint brush inside of the doors that fills up the structural hole. The engine will sort out the rest.

[obsidian]

Show us a screenshot or draw a diagram. It's hard to recommend how to fix vis issues without an overhead of the map layout.

You can use more than one area portal for a section so long as the entire area is sealed off from the rest of the map. For example, we have a room with a door on one side to the rest of the map, a corridor on the other side of the room, and a door on the other side of the corridor to the rest of the map. As long as both doors contain area portals, they will work. Think of it as a fishbowl that needs to be sealed at both entrances to prevent the water from leaking into the rest of the map.

Your only other alternative are hints, but they will only work in certain cases. Check out my advanced hint tutorial in the stickies.

There really isn't much else. Antiportal supposedly works, but I've never got around the HoM issue. "Foghull" distance culling is another possible solution, but you would have to have a heavy fog filled map.

[Quack]

This is a simplified structural section of the map for testing with vis so excuse the caulk and unfinished details. First image shows top down view looking at the room highlighted. The room contains two doors and two staircases. The problem is that the two staircases wrap around into the same area, so there is no way to properly seal the room. The only way to accomplish this would be putting another set of doors in front of the two staircases, so four doors instead of two, which is simply not an option because it ruins connectivity and is not aesthetically pleasing. The second and third image show the line of sight through the doors from both directions. I want to eliminate the line of sight through the doors so that the staircases from either side won't be rendered when you are walking on the upper platform. With lots of hint brushes, each staircase and walkway next to each door can be optimized by splitting the leaves into little sections along the x axis. What I don't understand is why the area portal has to be sealed to work. Why not just show the leaves that are visible when the door opens? Instead of one sealed area that turns on/off. In that case it would work perfectly because that room could be divided up into like four leaves, and when the door opens it would show either what's in the room, or if both doors open what's in the room and on the other side. Maybe that's just wishful thinking for a game that's almost ten years old. Other than the area portal, are there any other options? I don't understand what the anti portal is used for, so I'm not sure if that's an option. Any thoughts or suggestions?

[obsidian]

Assuming you are going to be building more stuff on the second floor above those curved stairs, and that the second floor will have proper structural brushes and hint preventing the insides from being drawn, 2 diagonal hint brushes can be placed where those stairs are (like this: / \ ).

You can also increase the length of those hallways with the doors to create a couple of L-shaped hallways with hint brushes inside instead of the areaportal at all.

But that's a pretty small map so far, so even with all polys drawn it shouldn't be too bad.

[Quack]

The previous images showed one quarter of the main area, each quarter is copied to create a symmetric arena style courtyard and all paths converge on the center area. The problem with the line of sight with full symmetry is worse because you can see all the way across when you are on the upper walkway. My concern is not so much viewing the opposite side, but hiding the main lower staircases that are right/left from the end of the big staircase. I threw together a quick massing of rectangles so you can conceptually understand the bigger picture here. There will be a fair amount of detail on the rectangular structural hull. So when the player is at the far end, looking up at the facade of each quadrant and all of the detail on the stairs below I expect the tris will be about at most 10k-12k, and flux between about 5k-10k when moving around the walkways. Again, the main concern is not so much the amount of triangles in the geometry, but the fact that people will be fighting in the each of the four areas. So with all of the character models, projectiles, decals, it will add an extra 5k+ which is getting close to 20k. I tested with 9 bots in that courtyard, and it was approaching about 17k. If the doors would block vis and not allow the smaller staircases to be viewed from the far ends of the big staircase, then there would be a drastic reduction of tris. This is why I want to get the doors to block vis.