Solid area & Hint brushes

[Veleran]

Further down this Page is a small demo level attachment,that shows the use of solid doors and hint brushes to seperate parts of the level.
When the door is closed,anything that is behind the door is not rendered and the framerate is balanced.
So,you can have smaller scale lightmaps inside the room and more detailed shadows among others.
Note:the area door model must cover the opening tightly.


Now,apart from this sealing techique which works perfecty for hiding the Bsp geometry that is behind closed doors,
i discovered a few "bugs" about the actors that use lower-polygon versions as LOD at various distances set in EnvironmentSettup entity and are inside sealed rooms.

I used the driver=wireframe and saw that the pawns outside were rendered because i had set LOD distances in the environment settup-they remained on screen untill reached the lod5 distance.
When i set all the Lod distances to 0,they werent rendered (while in the room with the door closed).

I mean the actors were always drawn on screen untill the camera reached Lod5-in which they are removed.


Also,the following is nt documented in the help.
After you seal parts of the level with solid "area" models you have to place hint brushes in the opening to walk through
(narrower than the door-or the player might pass through the border of the door).


P.S.If there was another one version of the area brush that should clip (as it does now) whatever is behind it,but only when it on screen behind walls-example:when this area brush is behind corners.

And,when its is visible and nothing covers it completely,it would stop the clipping-
Like when you turn around the corner and face the area brush,so you will see what is beyond it.

That is because now,the area model will clip what is behind the corner,ok-
but when you face it you will see the skybox behind it and nothing else.
For the moment you can add doors instead of this.

I you dont place area doors to seal it in sections,as the player (the red figure )
will enter from the northeast everything in the plan will be rendered even if he cant see it.

[Veleran]

I placed four rooms with area doors and placed three Pawns in room three.

And,i added an empty invisible model inside the entrance of the room,so when you bump at the door the three pawns will be spawned by this trigger
(so they are not rendered if you have nt yet opened the door).

Hint:The trigger model and hint brushes split the surfaces they are touching to more polygons (as i saw in wireframe)
so i kept a distance to them from the walls and floor.

I run it,forward and bumped at the door to open it,and then run backwards away from the room to see in wireframe as the door closed,if the inside of the room will be hided.
Sucsess-Now pawns inside the room were hidden whenever the door was closed.

I run many times from northeast to the southwest towards the door 3 to open and close it to make sure the area door works,and after doing this sometimes,it crashed.

When i removed the Trigger model it still crashed.
When i deleted the three pawns it stopped crashing.
So,there might be something with the actors and the area sealing i guess.

I temporary replaced the pawns i used with RF's robot pawn name.
So if you test this level,replace the pawns with a working pawn type you have.
Please test it if you can,because this area bug with the actors might be fixed.

[Veleran]

I have attached a .zip with the .3dt of this Level with the four rooms.
The name "robot" is just to distinguish it from the original version i made with different .txl and pawns.
I just used this common robot pawn type so you dont get missing pawn type errors.
I dont know why door4 stucks open.

[Veleran]

The test i did and crashed was exactly this:
I opened the door,and then moved backwards northeast away from the door,still facing it(like the direction in the pic).
The direction maybe not be important,but thought to mention it.
After moving back and forth 5-6 times it crashed-pitty.But i dont want to give up.
It also crashed again as i stood and looked at the closed door from a distance.

I have placed the playerstart to face at the door.
Anyone want to download the sample level and try the same?

If you dont get a crash,try setting door3 to Playeronly = false.
Then if you enter the room and immediately get out and wait for a while,the pawns will open the door.
You can shoot the one-two of them while they are still in the room
(just in case the problem is the area door) and the rest as soon as they come out,and then wait untill you get a crash.
To me it can shut down while i do nothing at anywhere in the level after some minutes.

[metal_head]

Dude,that was really helpful,I didn't actually knew how to use the area doors 'till now,I didn't know that I have to put hint brushes on the doors. THANKS for the tut!