Bah, area portals...

[DISorder]

GtkRadiant

MP

 

Can anyone provide me with a good tutorial on how to do area portals? Rich Diesals tutorial didnt help me any and the way I have my area portals currently, still isnt working.

 

This is how I have my areaportals in relation to my doors currently:

Say the door is 10x50 (from the top view), my area portal would be about 9x50. So both the area portal and the door would be touching the door frame. I thought this was the right way to do it, but obviously it isnt because the game draws everything when I do r_showtris 1.

 

I am eager for a reply

 

Thanks

[Takeoffyouhoser]

bear with me on this explanation.... please!!

 

step 1

 

Take any 3 cd's in your music collection. I choose 2 Gamma Ray cd's and one Dio album. any 3 will work though!!

 

step 2

 

Stand the 3 cd's up so they look like a square door. These cd's make up your door, for this example.

 

Step 3

 

Now, look at that cd # 2, the one in the middle.... thats your area portal. That cd in the middle is excatly what dimensions your area portal should look like...it is the same dimensions as your door, its only MUCH THINNER !!!!!!

 

Step 4

 

make a brush the same dimensions as your door, and texture it with Area Portal. Then place this brush right inside your door, and make it so it looks like that middle cd, thin enough to fit inside the door brush, and make sure its centered, jsut like the the middle cd was..

 

*You may need to change your grid settings to make the area portal brush fit properly inside your door, too...

 

thats basically it... just keep those 3 cd's there for a reference!

[Wes Marrakesh]

My tutorial didn't help?

[DISorder]

it helped but it doenst seem to be working Wes...now im trying to figure out this 3 cd concept..lol

[lassev]

Although it has been doubted in the past, still I can give you one piece of additional information to ponder. If you have a hole in your wall for the door, yet you want the door also have light frames, as doors often do in the real life also, and the frames protrude a little from the wall, you can save VIS time be making them detail brushes (or if they are curves). Yet, for the area portal to work in this situation, you must stretch it to also cover (go inside) the frames.

 

Still, you might not want to play with this before you got your basic area portals to do your bidding.

 

And to save trouble, I remind you that often the faulty entity is not the area portal or the door, but some leak elsewhere between the rooms.

[Leslie Judge]

A little add-on:

 

You use GtkRadiant. So probably you use q3map2 to compile. In the newer versions (and I think 2.3.32 has this feature already) you don't have to cover your areaportal brush with the system/areportal shader on each side, just one. The one where you want to make the actual split between the two areas, so you don't have to worry about how thin is your brush anymore.

 

The other sides have to be textured with the common/skip. This comes with q3map2 and can be found in the extras directory of the archive.

[DISorder]

Actually Leslie, I use sof2map(sp?), never learned to use q3map, is it better? If it is i'll try giving it a shot. They have the option to use it on Radiant, I just never used it. Can you point me to a tutorial on how to use it, like adding the extra -commands?

 

Thanks

 

As for the area portal problem, i've centered it, my door is 8 units thick and my area portal is 4 right in the middle, I dont get it. But I checked my junk file and it looks like it leaked somewhere, plus a slew of other problems. *sigh*

 

 

EDIT:

BTW, in my junk file there are about 20 of these all with different numbers:

WARNING: areaportal brush 1552 doesn't touch two areas

how can i find areaportal brush 1552? Or can I?

[Leslie Judge]

You can find the brush with the Misc \ Find brush menu item.

 

See? One reason to use BSP monitoring. (I'm not sure it is working with sof2map too.) When a problem occures, the new GtkRadiant pops up a debug window and shows the problems there. If you click on a row in that window, Radiant will select the appropriate brush / patch / entity for you.

 

Q3map2 can be better in different ways. Complile is much faster, and the lighting can be more realistic with the new options. And there are several enhancements like the ASE model support, bump mapping, etc. However the light styles aren't implemented yet.

 

I remember someone made a short tutorial about using q3map2. Maybe wudan is that person? I really don't remember. Search for it on the forums.

 

But anyway, there are the compile commands in the BSP menu, so you can try them out easily. Just keep in mind that the lowest few of them are only for a single phase of the whole compile.

[lassev]

To my eternal disappointment I couldn't use Q3map2 very long. One by one my both maps began to gave me an error message, when compiled with Q3map2, although I would have liked it better than sof2map. It was something like maximum shader number (1024) exceeded by #.

 

The most foolish thing about it was that when I actually went forward to decrease my shader number (by decreasing the number of different shaders used, which wasn't over 1024 obviously), I only got greater exceedings according to Q3map2. In the game I got lots of surfaces with nothing but gray color, so it had to be good-bye to Q3map2.

[Leslie Judge]

Yes, the number of internal shaders created for lightmaps is higher with q3map2 as ydnar said. Or something like this. You can check it on the SplashDamage forums. There is a thread about this.

[lassev]

Aha! So it has actually nothing to do with different shaders, or usage of dark shaders, but everything to do with light emitting entities. Thanks a lot, your honour, Judge. This will indeed give me something to think about. Although i can survive with the sof2map, because of my heavy usage of detail brushes. I don't have that long compilation times anyway.

[yangyan]

Areaportals block out the drawings of tris when the door is closed.

 

for example:

 

-------------------------

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

-------------------------

 

Not so much help but in the top view looks like that. (The As)

 

Side:

 

|A|

|A|

|A|

|A|

|A|

|A|

|A|

|A|

|A|

 

Place em like that