From: Sonya Roberts To: ml@qoole.com Reply-To: ml@qoole.com Date: Mon, 01 Sep 1997 14:06:29 -0400 Subject: Re: Texture clipping bug? Dazzler wrote: > Has anyone found their maps textures being lost or drawn incorrectly? I > am finding more and more often that areas, especially where there a lots > of thin brushes are having horrific texture clipping. Items like health > also get half drawn when viewed from different angles. Eventually the > map tends to crash. Yes, this problem is a relatively common one. No, it is not Qoole-specific. First, avoid having ANY areas with "lots of thin brushes"...I used to do that too, and have found the hard way that it's a killer as far as your rendering times, r_speeds, etc. are concerned, plus one of the prime causes of texture blurring. Other possible causes of texture blurring (there's many of them, and I _still_ haven't found the ultimate How To Get Rid Of Blurring answer) include the following: 1) Having too many moving or texture-animated objects in view at the same time, such as torches, armor, weapons, or health boxes. For some reason (possibly the fact that it has an animated texture?) health boxes are particularly bad for causing this. 2) The aforementioned "lots of thin brushes". QBSP, Light, and VIS *DO NOT LIKE* thin brushes, esp. in groups (grills, screens, fences, jungle gyms, grates, etc.), and most especially if light can shine between the spaces between the thin brushes. And putting a light that flickers or strobes or anything like that anywhere near such a creation is just asking for disaster. Basicly, make things solid if at all possible. 3) Angled surfaces. QBSP, Light, and VIS seem to be optimised more for straight horizontals and verticals than for anything of any kind that is placed at an angle. In fact, having slanted surfaces in your map can actually cause non-existant errors, such as the floor beneath an angled surface being incorrectly calculated, so that you drop through its top surface and end up slow-motion-wading on it's underside (or, if the map has been fully vised and there's nothing beneth the floor, right out of the map). 4) Overly high r_speeds and r_polycount are also common in areas with texture blurring; these areas have been "overbuilt" and either contain too many objects themselves, or join without obstruction onto too many other large adjoining areas. Keeping your r_speeds and r_polycount low are always a good idea. You should also check your map occasionally during development with r_draworder to see what areas are "seeing into" what other areas, to help you decide if you need to add doglegs or screening walls etc. (Note: always VIS to at least a level 2 before using r_draworder, fast and level 1 don't seem to calculate enough of the visibility order for r_draworder to be of any real use). 5) Flickering, strobing, or otherwise animated light sources. They're a bugger for cpu usage from what I understand, and you should try to stick to using them only rarely and prefereably in isolated areas where the variable light levels are contained and, most importantly, avoid overlapping them as much as possible. They're also quite bad for r_speeds, I beleive, if you have more than one or two of them within the player's view at any given time. If anyone knows of any other causes/solutions for texture blurring, please let me know! The *&$^&%$(* stuff still sometimes shows up in my maps, even when I've paid close attention to all of the above. -- Sonya Roberts ________^ ^ ^ ^________ ^ ^________ ________/(((((((=O!O= =O.O=)))))))\_____=OYO= \________ *---------\_)___(__)/) C\C_)____C_/------C\C_)____C_/---------* MS. BARROW'S CONSENSUAL REALITY http://webhome.idirect.com/~sonyar SONYA'S PAGE OF POV STUFF http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/1022 CONTAMINATED LEVELS http://www.trailerpark.com/siesta/sonyar/index.htm ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE RENDERING TIMES http://www.spake.org/rtimes/