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[ReD NeCKersoN]

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A map by breli. Please post comments here.

[Breli]

Hello fellas,

I really appreciate any suggestions and comments on the map. So if there is anything you don't like, please let me know.

We already have one strange issue, which I don't fully understand. All people that saw the map prior to this test didn't complain that it is too dark. However, Red told me that it was found to be too dark during the first tests. I guess that the general lighting conditions are similar in Europe and the US, so the problem must be somewhere else ...

I use lightmap with brightness app. 60 percent. Card: nvidia Geforce FX 5200 something and matrox G550. Monitor settings are quite normal, too. I can see quite good. There are only 2 or 3 places which are not supposed to be seen from afar since spawn points are placed there. However, Red says that he has to push brightness to 100 percent in order to play the map.

[EDIT]
To illustrate this, I made some screenshots:

This is how the map looks like on my machine with brightness set to app. 60 percent:

http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/6651 ... ent0vf.jpg

That's the way it is supposed to look. A wonderful moonlight night. Everything can be seen, but still it feels like it is night and there are some dark corners. When I set brightness to 100 percent, however, it looks like this:

http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/8113 ... ent2qr.jpg

which is basically a daylight map with the wrong sky. I don't understand why the map apparently looks that different on other machines.

[/EDIT]

Strange. It's somewhat difficult to fix this if it looks just good on my machine. Anyway, got to work on that ...

breli

[El vAkonD]

Hi Breli!
I've looked your map, and i've got a very confusing result. When i've started the map with the original graphics detail(a bit slow for me), with lightmapped lightning, the map looked too dark to me. At some parts of the map, I coudn't see anything.
here are some screenshots:
http://borso.tvn.hu/scrs/shot0005.jpg
http://borso.tvn.hu/scrs/shot0006.jpg

And when i've switched from lightmapped lightning to vertex, to make the game run better, it became far too light.
http://borso.tvn.hu/scrs/shot0007.jpg
http://borso.tvn.hu/scrs/shot0012.jpg

This doesnt happen on original maps, i dont know what cause it.

By the way, i've liked your map, very nice work!

[M.R.]

i don't find the map too dark at all.

[Breli]

Hi El + M.R.,

Thank you very much for your review. I am not really sure what vertex does but I guess that in vertex mode most lighting effects like shadows are ignored in order to improve performance. There is a difference in most stock maps, too, but it isn't that obvious because most of them use "normal" lighting. Since each lampion in my map is a light source which account for nearly all light emitting surfaces, there is a much more obvious difference to other maps in vertex mode that are normally lighted. I am just guessing here since I have no clue about this stuff ...

Additionally, it is not good that it doesn't run on your machine with standard settings. But as I already posted in another thread, I am not sure what to do about that. Placing hint brushes will not help AFAIK. The problem is the amont of brushes that are drawn.

The map contains app. 3000 brushes. Most of them can be seen permanently. I can't do anything about that unless the overall map layout is changed or some genius shows up who explains me how to hint brush the map In comparison, one of the stock maps (wq_canyon) contains app. 2000 brushes (because the author understood how to use textures whereas I fiddled around for ages with small stuff). Additionally, portions of the map can be isolated by hint brushes. Thus, brushes that are invisible from the current player position are not drawn and performance increases. I tried to isolate the cave system but that didn't work because of the wells (and this is also the reason why I didn't improve the surroundings of the map like somebody suggested).

Hmmm. I am not sure what to do now

[L3th4l]

There is one thing you should remember when mapping for id's games.. Always design your map with hinting in mind. You need to consider this even more so for WQ3, as it's maps are going to be based mostly outside. The Q3 engine was not designed for outdoor maps and hinting a outdoor map is very hard. Thus you need to design your outdoor map like it is a corridor map .. Best thing I can suggest is keep the brush count down and hint where ever possible.. One more thing, keep the amount of breakable objects down. The more you add the bigger the FPS hit..

[ReD NeCKersoN]

My view of the map looks much like your screenshots, breli. To the few who tested it this weekend, the map itself is not so dark. It is the very dark corners that gave us some concern as we found it confusing when we can't see where we are going. I sent an email explaining all of this but I thought I would post here so others might benefit. Anyway, the email explains how to brighten the map without making it too bright. Perhaps you could experiment with the procedure and send El Vakond the results for testing? Unfortunately, I am not sure what to do about vertex lighting for NightFort but I am sure there is a way to adjust that in the light stage of the compile. We will have to search some tutorials to find answers. I'm glad El Vakond brought that up so I can test my own project to see how it looks. I will let you know if I find any tips for compiling vertex light. As a side note, we had a blast playing your map! I expect it will be well received by wq3 fans.

[M.R.]

i don't see how the map is any darker than br_haunted

[Breli]

Hi everybody,

(increased lighting of the map with ambient) Perhaps you could experiment with the procedure and send El Vakond the results for testing?

I'll brighten the map a little, so that you can see from where I am actually killing you . The ambient light feature, however, is not recommended:

http://www.qeradiant.com/manual/Q3Rad_M ... /pg9_1.htm

I'll experiment with it anyway. Putting additional light entities with the spotlight function that are not too bright may also be a solution. I don't know whether that'll look weird and unnatural, though.

Unfortunately, I am not sure what to do about vertex lighting for NightFort but I am sure there is a way to adjust that in the light stage of the compile. We will have to search some tutorials to find answers.

I don't think that you can adjust that in the compile stage, since lighting information are "uniquely" specified for the map AFAIK. In vertex mode the engine throws away all lighting information and just displays everything with the same brightness. That's like compiling with Light -fast. I am just guessing here, since I do not fully understand how the engine actually handles lighting information but it would surprise me that you can include different lighting "versions" in a map. The visual difference in the stock maps is not that distinctice since they don't have so much dark corners and shadows.

Besides the lighting issues and the other minor things that came up during testing, I would like to do something about performance so that El can join the fun . Since hint brushing is not going to help here, I am thinking about reducing the brush count without altering the visual appearance too much. For instance, the railing (which is made of brushes) can be replaced by the ladder texture like in the stock maps. Opaque textures, however, are although eating up performance. Does anybody have an idea (as a rule of thumb), how many brushes have to replaced in order to actually improve performance? As for the railing, 55 (brushes) * 4 (visible faces) * 2 (triangles) = 440 surfaces would be replaced. That's not going to boost performance, though Probably I can chop down one or two trees, too.

But these things will not really help, I guess. Well, I'll think about it. Probably, I'll just try to hint brush crazy ...

breli

[Breli]

I did a little research on the vertex lighting issue. As far as I understand this article:

http://shaderlab.com/q3map2/manual/

it should be possible to enable shadows even in vertex mode. There are probably two solutions: exclude vertex with the "novertex" switch in q3maptoolz OR force "better vertex" by using the settings q3map_vertexscale and q3map_vertexshadows.

Does anybody know something about this stuff? Compiling takes several hours so a plan would be a good idea instead of this trial-and-error thing

breli

[El vAkonD]

I did a little research on the vertex lighting issue. As far as I understand this article:

http://shaderlab.com/q3map2/manual/

it should be possible to enable shadows even in vertex mode. There are probably two solutions: exclude vertex with the "novertex" switch in q3maptoolz OR force "better vertex" by using the settings q3map_vertexscale and q3map_vertexshadows.

Does anybody know something about this stuff? Compiling takes several hours so a plan would be a good idea instead of this trial-and-error thing

breli

hm you can't compile the map via q3map2, 'cause its not compatible with wq3 (through the new surfaces), so you have to look at if these switches are reachable from the good ol' wq3 q3map. If not, you cant use them.

[ReD NeCKersoN]

El vAkonD must have read my mind. I'm not sure if those switches are available in Spoon's q3map but I guess there is only one way to find out.
I understand that the use of ambient lighting is not reccomended but when I compiled your map with a value of 5 I did not see any noteable degradation in overall appearance. Another option you might try is using the key _minlight which is supposed to assign a minimum light value to the entire map. In other words, lighted areas that surpass the minimum value would not be affected and very dark places would be raised to the minimum value you set. I have not tried _minlight yet so I can't say how it would look in NightFort. AFAIK you put it in worldspawn in place of ambient and you would still need to use the _color key to get it to work.

As for hint brushing, at the very least you should be able to keep the tunnels from being drawn when you are in the street and vice versa.

[Breli]

Hi everybody

El vAkonD must have read my mind. I'm not sure if those switches are available in Spoon's q3map but I guess there is only one way to find out.

Yes, I know that most switches in q3map will not work. Anyway, there is a "novertex" switch in q3map and I'll try to use that. I'll report here whether that works out or not. All these switches and stuff Quite confusing for a retard like me

ambient lighting

I have compiled the map with an ambient value of 8 which I find too bright. I'll do the final compile with 5 as you suggested. Hopefully, this will keep the overall appearance while helping those that are scared in the dark

hint brushing

I already hint brushed the tunnels. That worked quite well in some leaf nodes while it failed for whatever reasons in other ones that were even farther away. Now I added dozens of hint brushes in order to avoid that the backsides of the buildings are drawn. I HOPE that this will work out as expected. AFAIK too much hint brushes will only increase VIS compile time and can't cause other problems.

breli

(who is really happy since a final compile seems to be feasible soon)

[Breli]

The "novertex" switch doesn't work At least there is no visible difference in vertex mode. Thus, I've no idea how I can improve the overall appearance for those who are playing in vertex mode.

Some good news: hint brushing crazy worked. There are still some leaf nodes from which virtually the whole map is drawn. Additionally, I guess I have some "microleaks" within my structural brushes. Anyway, I hope that the overall performance improved quite a bit.

breli

[Breli]

Vertex lighting again:

Since I want to finish my map, I did a little additional research on the vertex lighting issue. As far as I understand this:

q3map_vertexshadows

[NEW] By default, no shadows are cast on vertex-only lit surfaces (see surfaceparm pointlight). Also when running Quake III Arena in vertex lighting mode, no shadows are cast upon any surfaces (shadows are part of the light map). When using this shader option shadows *will* be cast on the surface when vertex lit. However sharp shadow edges won't be seen on the surface because light values are only calculated at the vertexes.

from

http://www.qeradiant.com/manual/Terrain ... _comm.html

The casting of vertex is a shader option rather than a compiler setting. Thus, only those textures that have this option in their shader definition look decent while others are simply too bright. This doesn't explain the confusing results I got (sometimes the same texture is correctly lighted sometimes it isn't)

Still, I don't know what I am supposed to do with this information . As for the moment, I am not able to solve this.

breli