Hint Brushes

[Druid Bremen]

Now, before you all kill me, and post lots of links for me to go to, I've gone to all those links already. I pretty much understand hint brushes now. Okay, so here's what happened: Yesterday, I wanted to make a test map for hint brushes. It simply consists of a corridor, with a 90 degree bend, or whatever.

 

Then I put a hint brush at the bend.

 

 

 

 

I compile, and then I go ingame. Then I type /developer 1, and /r_showtris. And, err.... I still see all the triangles.

 

 

 

Wtf! Am I doing something wrongly, or.....?

[Mercenary]

It takes practice and sometimes some trial and error to place them correctly. Don't forget to filter out your detail brushes before you place the hint brushes.

[lassev]

I fully agree with Mercenary, although I would replace the "sometimes some" with "often a lot of"...

 

Yeah, the bottom line is that if you have issues with FPS, place them, but don't expect them to always work. In ideal 90 degrees corridors (like in the tutorials) they should work, but in more difficult places they are not always so trustworthy. Although they can also surprise you the other way around.

[WadeV1589]

Once you get used to them you can load up the portal viewer and know where to place them almost all of the time. Sometimes it really is just impossible because of the way you mapped but most of the time, you can at least cut out *some* of the triangles.

 

Remember, hint brushes don't have to be on a corner nor at an obscure angle, sometimes keeping them straight can work just as well

 

-------    -------------
              |
_______________|   P 
^^
hint surface
------------------------

 

In this example as you can see I placed the hint brush horizontal with that small extruding wall. Whenever the player stands where he is now or to the right around the corner and thru that door (that I implied with a gap) will never be drawn.

[lassev]

Originally posted by WadeV1589

Remember, hint brushes don't have to be on a corner nor at an obscure angle, sometimes keeping them straight can work just as well

 

In this example as you can see I placed the hint brush horizontal with that small extruding wall. Whenever the player stands where he is now or to the right around the corner and thru that door (that I implied with a gap) will never be drawn.

 

Very nice! I think I must keep that in mind. That's how Raven often used hints, I believe. I now begin to see what was the idea behind that, when it before seemed just random to me.

[Jedi_Vogel]

Out of interest Wade, how long have you been mapping, cos you're great with the amount of knowledge and stuff you have to explain our issues

[{NJO}*Dark]

also, i have never been able to find the portal viewer, where is it?

[WadeV1589]

3...almost 4 years with the Quake 3 engine.

 

Plugins menu, prtview, then go Load .prt file, you need to BSP your map first to get a .prt file.

[{NJO}*Dark]

ty (only been mapping for 3 months)

[lauser]

Wade is correct. Have a look at the S/P maps from JA. Specifically the rift map. It has HINT brushes running all the way from the top of the canyon right to the bottom. I think the Korriban Siege map also has a HUGE HINT plopped right smack in the middle of the map....I think it's that map anyhow. I usually stick to putting them in a 90 degree hallway. Or even a T-juction hallway will work too. Try it on either side of this type of hallway to achieve the best result.

[Druid Bremen]

Err.............. The point of starting the thread is to rectify the problems with my hint brush. I put a triangle hint brush.

 

--------------------------------------------
|========================== /                |
|=                          /                  |
|=                        /                    |
|=                      /                      |
|=                    /                        |
|=                  /----------------------------
|=                /  |
|=              /    |
|=            /      |
|=          /        |
|=        /          |
|=      /            |
|=   /               |
|=/                  |
|=                   |
|                     |
|                     |
|       P            |
------------------

 

Legend: | and - Structural brushes

/ and = Hint brush

Right, so its really hard to post ASCII or whatever here, so you'll just have to make do with my bad ascii drawings and the forum's way of dealing with them.

 

So now, you can pretty much see that I've covered part of the place with hint brush. But when I go ingame, I just can see all the triangles, despite the hint brush. Err.. Help!

[WadeV1589]

Did you compile with BSP and VIS? A BSP only compile will not let you see the results of placing hint brushes.

 

Also make sure all faces of that brush are covered in system/skip with only the diagonal face having system/hint on it.

 

Failing both of those, I can have a look if you like.

[lauser]

System skip? Is this new? I've never seen system skip applied to a HINT brush before...

[Druid Bremen]

System/skip? What's that for? All the tutorials ( I think ) never said anything about using system/skip on hint brushes. Well, I'll try........

 

Edit: I don't see any difference, except 1 less triangle when I huddle into a corner.

[WadeV1589]

Raven talking about skip and antiportal.

 

Quote of interest:

The skip shader is used on any hint, areaportal, antiportal etc etc etc face that you do not need. If you make an areaportal, five of the six brush sides should be made of the skip texture and only one of the forward faces should be textured with areaportal. This is a nice little efficiency texture.

[{NJO}*Dark]

s'pose it makes sense

[Druid Bremen]

Makes sense to me too. But not to MY engine.

[mslaf]

Since the recent q3map2 versions the behavior of Hint portals HAVE changed. They have become PRIMARY bsp splitters and therefore sometimes they may not work as you want them to work. There no magic here but like always with open source programs its lack of current documentation

 

There're some rules that could be useful if you don't want to have problems with hints:

 

1. Don't use non axial or non rectangular hints if you don't need to - in most cases you don't.

2. If you need to use them, put an axial hint around it: |\| to avoid far splits in other parts of your map (this in a q3map2 bug in my opinion)

 

If you want to split the BSP with old fashioned hint you must create a special shader for that. Copy the hint shader and remove the "surfparm hint". BTW: It's already present in GTK 1.4+ but I'm not sure about it because I still use 1.2 with my own system shaders.

 

This shader has the same behavior like the hint shader from all Q3A mapping tutorials.

 

textures/system/hint_original

{

qer_editorimage textures/system/hint.jpg

qer_nocarve

qer_trans 0.9

surfaceparm noimpact

surfaceparm nodraw

surfaceparm nonsolid

surfaceparm nonopaque

surfaceparm trans

q3map_nolightmap

q3map_structural

}

 

Follow this thread you want to know about hints (problem #2 ... )

 

http://www.splashdamage.com/index.php?name=pnPHPbb2&file=viewtopic&t=7003

[mslaf]

To have it working you need to compile the map with:

 

q3map2 -vis -game ja ....

 

and not with:

 

q3map2 -vis -fast -game ja...

[Druid Bremen]

Originally posted by mslaf

Since the recent q3map2 versions the behavior of Hint portals has changed. They have become PRIMARY bsp splitters and therefore sometimes they may not work as you want them to work. There no magic here but like always with open source programs its lack of current documentation

 

There're some rules that could be useful if you don't want to have problems with hints:

 

1. Don't use non axial or non rectangular hints if you don't need to - in most cases you don't.

2. If you need to use them, put an axial hint around it: |\| to avoid far splits in other parts of your map (this in a q3map2 bug in my opinion)

 

If you want to split the BSP with old fashioned hint you must create a special shader for that. Copy the hint shader and remove the "surfparm hint". BTW: It's already present in GTK 1.4+ but I'm not sure about it because I still use 1.2 with my own system shaders.

 

This shader has the same behavior like the hint shader from all Q3A mapping tutorials.

 

textures/system/hint_original

{

qer_editorimage textures/system/hint.jpg

qer_nocarve

qer_trans 0.9

surfaceparm noimpact

surfaceparm nodraw

surfaceparm nonsolid

surfaceparm nonopaque

surfaceparm trans

q3map_nolightmap

q3map_structural

}

 

Follow this thread you want to know about hints (problem #2 ... )

 

http://www.splashdamage.com/index.php?name=pnPHPbb2&file=viewtopic&t=7003

 

 

Err... In most cases? In THIS case, I require such a hint brush.

[mslaf]

Have you seen the screen shots?

You need to split the BSP leafs not necessary by using hints. Every transparent structural brush can do it - and the shader I gave you can do it too. It works just like the normal structural brush or the hint from the tutorials (call it a historical hint). The “modern” hints have the highest priority in the vis processing code that could sometimes lead to the problems - the far splits for example. I just advice you to not use them when they are not axial ( / ). Don't follow the tutorials in this matter because most of them are obsolete.