Quake3World

Hello all, I have made a curious discovery.

While optimizing a map I noticed that when running Quake 3 Arena with r_showtris 1, There was no culling happening, either from occlusion or my areaportals. Every goldarned triangle was drawing.

After much experimentation, I narrowed it down to the -skyfix command while building (I had it after -meta but before vis). Removal of this item from bsp allowed sections of the map to be culled. Some of my areaportals even worked!

I'm on GTK Radiant 1.6.6, a recent switch. I tried building with the q3map2 from 1.6.5 and this seemed to improve culling with -skyfix slightly, but still much worse than without -skyfix.

For now, I'm just building without. Any thought as to why this might happen?

Why are you using area portals?

I didn’t say you shouldn’t use area portals, I just asked why. It struck me that it wouldn’t necessarily be a first call to controlling vis in Q3A. Doors a a bit more SP. Also areaportaled doors have a nasty bug in spectator mode, certainly in VQ3.
Again, no biggy if someone wants doors in their map, I just thought it was unusual.

Thanks, guys. I've seen the black borders in Q3 with my old ATi/AMD card, but I'm on Nvidea now, which never had the bug -skyfix adresses. Ioquake fixes the bug even for AMD. I was told to use it here by Eraser a couple of years back.

-skyfix

Enables fix for buggy ATI GL_CLAMP behavior. Always use this.
Sidenote: ATI's behavior is correct. The bug was with *NVIDIA* drivers not distinguishing between GL_CLAMP and GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE, and Q3 using the wrong one: since Q3 development was done predominantly on nVidia hardware, nobody noticed it until too late.

Anyhow, only ATi/AMD users with the original ID builds should see the cracks. Just strange that it would create this performance issue.

As to why areaportals: one, my maps are big and could use the help, and two, there's a definite SP/narrative aspect. This stuff is moving towards an actual SP game, eventually, and these would then be the MP versions of the maps from the SP game.