Hint Brush - Optimizing polygon count in complex levels....

[shadow]

RF does a pretty good job without hint brushes.

After completing my levels I use the wireframe view to walk around and see what gets rendered and what doesn't.
Most of the time it only draws whats necessary, and not every room.
really comes down to good level design.

If it can see part of a room it will draw the whole thing, but thats to be expected.
Hint brushes won't help in this case.

[Jay]

Yes RF does good job without hint brushes, but only with Full Vis enabled. With Full Vis enabled the compiler tests for ALL polys if they are to be drawn or not, not only for a part of all the polys. But sometimes the compiler makes mistakes especially when there are rooms a level up or down from the original room, say you are on the ground level and also some other, higher, levels are rendered.

However, hint brushes can't hurt. Why? More portals are better than lesser portals, because with more portals, there are lesser polys per portal and blablabla...in the end there is is a higher chance that lesser is rendered.

Using of areas is even more powerfull than relying on the compiler or placing hint brushes because with areas you are SURE that the area isn't rendered when you're outside of it.

[steven8]

Using of areas is even more powerfull than relying on the compiler or placing hint brushes because with areas you are SURE that the area isn't rendered when you're outside of it.

Areas. Do you mean area brushes?

[Jay]

Yes i mean area brushes.

[Juutis]

Is there any way to see which polygons (of bsp geometry) are rendered in RF?

[Jay]

in realityfactory.ini type:

driver = wireframe

or something like that.

[Juutis]

Thanks.

'driver = wire frame' did the trick.

Now I can really start optimizing my levels.

Thanks to everyone, BTW. I didn't have any clue about things like this before this thread. Very useful info.

[MakerOfGames]

Its funny isnt it? I didn't know about hint brushes either, even when I created this thread.

I found out about the hint brushes when I was searching google images for some wireframe game screens. I found the article with the hallway pic from my first post in this thread and then came here to ask about these mysterious "hint brushes". Then only after finding out that RF has these things, I found some good tutorials that explained all about them.

Seems like I stumbled over a gold mine.

I am just getting into the level design phase of my game and knowing about hint brushes now will help me design the levels to enable the highest possible frame rates!

[steven8]

Seems like I stumbled over a gold mine.

I sure think so. I'm rather anxious to see how they can help in many areas.

[fps]

i dont understand what it means to create a portal in al level. i am sure it has somthing to do with a wall that divides what can and cannot be seen by the player depending on where he is in the level but i may be mistaken and i am sure i am mistaken about how to use them. i have a large out doors area with sections i am sure that i can block up with hint brushes because you cant see anything but inside walls up to a certain point but that still leaves me with a large area no blocked off. what should i do?

Thanks,
fps

[zany_001]

are u using farclip and distance fog,cos that helps.

[creeper]

Hint brushes are not really suited for outdoor environments (to be more precise, the bsp structure genesis3d is using is not suited for outdoor environments no matter how you try to optimize it)

That's too bad. Is anyone working on modifying Genesis3d to run outdoor environments better? It seems that as long as you have something like hills or buildings to keep the game from rendering huge open spaces,.. you can still have well performing outdoor areas. It would have a sound-stage type look to it. You'd have to fake it,.. but you can still make convincing outdoor areas, right? Maybe not huge open outdoor areas.