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What's your longest compile time?


War Master

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I stopped a map after 16 hours of compiling because I don't think it should take that long. It's not a simple map, it's got mountains, terrain, buildings and open spaces. Still, 16 hours is too much in my opinion. Tell me what's the longest compile time you ever had and the basic specs of your computer.

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I had one that kinda time scale a few times, but that was when I didn't understand detail brushes. I don't think any map properly constructed should take that long to compile. Do you know about detail brushes and how to use them? If not I suggest you find out right away, there is a tutorial on RichDiesals site on just such a subject, I'm guessing you already know the address of that particular site :)

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Yeah, I know about detail brushes and I use them. I could never understand Rich Diesal's explanation but I learned from Emon. I went back to the terrain manual and it said to box in terrain with caulk brushes so I did that with my mountains and I made a few more brushes detail and the map compiled in 6 hours 20 mins. The Quake III engine doesn't seem to like open spaces with long views. My frame rate is around the high 50s in the long views. That's not bad but I got a GeForce4 ti4600 and I'm wondering how the map would perform with the average gamer video card.

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Originally posted by Karshaddii

98556 seconds (27.3766666666E hrs) on a Pentium 4 2.6 with 784 megs of Rambus.

 

That was my last map...I don't have the specifics on my most complex map but it was just under 2 full days.

 

Holy Compile Batman! What kind of maps are you making Karshaddii.

 

My biggest map has about 5000 brushes (200+ lights) and compiles in about 1 1/2 hours (using q3map2 - third from the top) and I am only using a Pentium 4 1.6Ghz with 256 megs of Rambus. I only started doing full compiles recently (before I just used the fast soft2map ones to just for general testing). I was afraid that my compile would take a long time because everywhere I read people are saying it's taking them hours and hours and hours.... Of course I'm not using bounce 8

 

Are you using the full bounce 8 compile? Just out of curiosity, how many brushes were in that map, and how many lights?

 

:cool:

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Lolz!

 

Yeah, I could show you some screenies--but I have made some of the biggest maps for JO...period (none of them will be released till everyone has mucho-fast computers--save for some clan-only maps Ive made)

 

Yeah, I'm an outdoor fr3ak--and I love to use the whole (eight?) yards compile time with (of course) sky lighting.

 

The map I mentioned has close to 10,000 brushes (9,958) and three thousand patch meshes...but the vis didn't take too long at all cause I build my maps super-neat (yes, I am a neat freak too) The vis time for that map was only about an hour.

 

As for actual light entities there were only about a thousand--they compiled pretty quick, but of those thousand about 300 were dynamic so I assume they took a bit longer.

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What's with all these ultra-long compile times? My current map has almost 12,000 brushes (patch meshes count for a couple thousand of that) and there's still more to do. On my last compile, it took less than 10 minutes with a 1.3 GHz AMD with 512 MB Ram. It's got some ambient light, a couple hundred light entities, multiple shaders and efx... what gives?

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No matter how detailed the rooms are (assuming you have built them correctly and used detail brushes properly) if they are small and enclosed then the compiler finishes rather fast. But when you have a VERY large outdoors map, all lit by ambient light--it takes quite a while to calculate several MILLION vertexes all on 8 bounce lighting.

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i was wondering, mine has about 1600 brushes, just over, and around 600 entities, it used to take arouind 10-19 mins to do, then i fixed all the leaks, now, it tskes over an hour, so i quit it, how long should it take, just can i get an estiment?

 

also which is faster for compiling gtk radiant or jk2 radiant? (i have jk2, so if gtk is faster then ill switch to that)

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I shut down my compile after 27 hours, I didn't want to kill my hard drive and overheat my CPU. I'm going to go back to the map and see if there's anything I can do to improve the compile time. I'm using an Athlon 2400XP and 512 DDR RAM.

 

I read on Quake III forums that you should increase the blocksize for maps with lots of terrain, as anyone tried it? I think it's called chopsize in JK2. You can edit it in the worldspawn.

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Originally posted by War Master

I read on Quake III forums that you should increase the blocksize for maps with lots of terrain, as anyone tried it? I think it's called chopsize in JK2. You can edit it in the worldspawn.

:) It is called blocksize in JK2.

 

I tried it and it made an impact on the vis time but with positive result. Bigger blocksize will create fewer leaf nodes in big open areas so the VIS can process them faster.

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The default blocksize is 1024 units. I'm new at this, so I'm no expert, try 1536 or 2048. From what I understand increasing the blocksize is mostly used for maps with wide open spaces like outdoor maps. I don't think you should mess around with it unless your map is taking way too much time to compile.

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I found a few leaks I had missed. Once I fixed them and reduced my skybox it only took 27 mins with q3map2 and 44 min with sof2map. However I get an error when I compile my map with q3map2, when I start up the map it says RE_AddPolyToScene:Null poly shader. I get that missing texture grid all over the place even on Kyle. There isn't any problems when I compile with sof2map.

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