Automating the application of "caulk" to non-visib

[xoltra]

This may not be the best forum, but since it is seems to be pretty active, and since people seem to know what they are talking about I thought I'd ask here.

Is there, or has anyone considered writing (possible as a gtkradiant plugin) a tool that would automatically set the texture to caulk for all surfaces that are not visible? I think a surface can safely caulked if every bit of it falls into one of three categories:
1) There is a path from it to the outside of the map.
2) It faces an enclosed volume that contains no entities.
3) It is coplaner with another surface.

Doing the above may be a bit tricky. And it may be best done in q3map2, possibly with a mechanism where feedback is provided to gtkradiant (like way the way *.lin files work currently).

Anyway, I'm just curious if that's something that has been considered since it seems like it could save mappers a bit of time.

[divVerent]

(autocaulk)
1) There is a path from it to the outside of the map.
2) It faces an enclosed volume that contains no entities.
3) It is coplaner with another surface.

IMHO 1) and 2) are unnecessary - q3map2 removes these faces anyway. At least it looks like this when you use "noclip" in the game.

[tZork]

1 and 2 are nessesary with deitail brushes. thise dont get hidden faces filterd out by q3map2.

yes i did think abt making a "caulker" plug for radiant, but i never got arround to it. imo its better to just build your brushes with caulk and texture the visible faces once you done shaping it. It would however make it mutch more ez to fix up not so well built maps with a aplug like this.

[xoltra]

Thanks for your reply. I'm glad you have thought about it. I just wanted to make sure the idea was out there, and apparently it is (has been thought of).

As to whether or not its needed - I did one quick experiment where I took a very simple map that I made that was just a hallow cube and I looked at the FPS from a given perspective in Nexuiz both before and after changing the texture from caulk to a visible texture. My FPS dropped from 400 to 325.

[tZork]

looking at fps alone aint always a good way, its hard to get it exactly the same each time.

there are some nice fetures in darkplaces to help out with determining how mutch is drawn:

r_speeds 1
this will show you a breakedown of whats drawn

r_showtris 1
will overlay a wireframe mesh for all drawn faces

[divVerent]

1 and 2 are nessesary with deitail brushes. thise dont get hidden faces filterd out by q3map2.

Right... even 3. is automatically done by q3map2 for structural brushes.

Sadly, the maps that most need it don't use detail brushes at all...

and now I feel bad about what I did to ctf_greatwall - I made most brushes detail (didn't even count them, I made all of them detail and then made the vis-blocking ones structural) without caulking them properly.

Well, at least this fixed that DarkPlaces bug which caused black flickering (I still have no idea where the bug exactly is, but with r_drawportals I often saw z-fighting portals and a short look with the editor showed that almost no coordinates are integers, so it could be as simple as roundoff errors causing this bug - after detail marking it correctly, the portals actually made sense and the bug went away).

Well, at least the map still renders fast enough, but that should be no surprise given that it's fairly simple.