I'm working on a map which is one big room with two giant meshes (landscape) with rocks and stuff scattered around. (no, this is not Caverna)

The framerate is between 60-200, depending on where I am on the map. But if I fire the shotgun into the ground/mesh the fps drops to single digits. Shots fired in to the sky have no such effect.

What causes this? How can I fix it? The level is playable as long as nobody shoots.. ;p

Does it also happen to other people playing your map? Could it be a driver problem?

victim wrote:Does it also happen to other people playing your map? Could it be a driver problem?

There are no other people on the map. Just me, all by myself.

(and no servers are hosting this thing)

Did you try turning off decals?

leileilol wrote:Did you try turning off decals?

Tried it just now. Made no difference. Turned off everything else while I was at it. Still no improvement.

Are they .ase models, or something else?

torus wrote:Are they .ase models, or something else?

The map has three types of components:
1: The outer box, brushes, which are solid.
2: Two huge meshes that cover the entire floor of the map.
3: Some detail brushes scattered around on the meshes.

Plus a skybox, which in addition to the box itself also has a mesh - to provide a distant landscape. I'm currently building a version of the map without the skybox mesh, just to see whether there is any improvement.

The "map info" in radiant tells me that the map has 160 brushes and 34 entities.

No, I meant- are the models .ase or some other format? iirc (but maybe not), there is a size limit to .md3 models.

The 'radiant, and I suppose it's derivative games are extremely buggy in handling meshes over 512 qu... this means that you need to either split up those meshes, or better yet, replace them with tri-soups.

Don't use detail brushes as so; structural brushes block visibility, therefore they will increase FPS by limiting what is drawn on screen.

[What you've been told about detail brushes is a lie, they actually reduce compile time at the expense of in-game FPS]

TVR wrote:The 'radiant, and I suppose it's derivative games are extremely buggy in handling meshes over 512 qu... this means that you need to either split up those meshes, or better yet, replace them with tri-soups.

What's a "tri-soup"? And how does one split up a mesh?

Don't use detail brushes as so; structural brushes block visibility, therefore they will increase FPS by limiting what is drawn on screen.

On the other hand, structural brushes create portals(?) and they can - if I understood correctly - reduce the framerate. But I'll try reverting all the brushes to structural brushes and see what happens.

torus wrote:No, I meant- are the models .ase or some other format? iirc (but maybe not), there is a size limit to .md3 models.

I haven't used models at all. Just brushes, meshes, and player starting points.

Use multiple meshes below 512 qu to replace the 2 large ones; if you want to do terrain, you must use a tri-soup [judging by the speed of your reply, I'll assume you're active, and could join IRC to have a quick tutorial with me].

Portals are created during compile time for use with a portal engine [ie Darkplaces], they tell the in-game renderer what is visible at a certain point in the map, preventing non-visible overdraw. Detail brushes do not create portals, therefore the renderer will draw EVERYTHING behind the detail brush, even if it is not visible to the player [non-visible overdraw].

Detail brushes are supposed to be used on 1 thing, detailing too trivial to warrant the extra compile time.

TVR wrote:Use multiple meshes below 512 qu to replace the 2 large ones; if you want to do terrain, you must use a tri-soup [judging by the speed of your reply, I'll assume you're active, and could join IRC to have a quick tutorial with me].

This:

http://www.map-craft.com/modules.php?na ... aux&did=18

Is what you mean by tri-soup, yes? Still sounds like a hideous number of brushes will be needed... as in thousands...

Is there a way to select and manipulate the vertexes of several brushes at the same time? That would make this a lot quicker.

To vertex manipulate several brushes at once select all of the brushes that you with to manipulate then change to vertex mode. Group-select the vertecies you wish to move in the 2D or 3D view then drag them around as normal, see below (sorry about the huge image size but JPEG looks awful for this kind of thing).

Seriously, why not just make an .ase model? That must me 100s of brushes.

I encountered that shotgun problem once in runningman_1on1_remix when firing at the sky (2 very large patches in an older version...). I don't know why it happened, but splitting up large models would be the right thing to do i guess. You should also create caulk brushes under the model to generate a good bsp-tree for better FPS.

A tutorial on creating organic brushwork in Blender and get it into the game can be found here: http://www.katsbits.com/htm/tutorials/b ... g_maps.htm
Don't bother with the texture blending there, as it's not supported in Nexuiz.
So torus is right by suggesting to use a bunch of *.ase models.

Strahlemann wrote:I encountered that shotgun problem once in runningman_1on1_remix when firing at the sky (2 very large patches in an older version...). I don't know why it happened, but splitting up large models would be the right thing to do i guess. You should also create caulk brushes under the model to generate a good bsp-tree for better FPS.

A tutorial on creating organic brushwork in Blender and get it into the game can be found here: http://www.katsbits.com/htm/tutorials/b ... g_maps.htm
Don't bother with the texture blending there, as it's not supported in Nexuiz.
So torus is right by suggesting to use a bunch of *.ase models.

While the tutorial looks like it could be worth going through, it doesn't look like the tutorial's demo map has much in common with what I'm trying to do; which is an irregular badland-type landscape with valleys and hills and big piles of rock here and there. There would be really long views when standing on the tops, but not when in the crevasses.

A tri/quad-soup would not be appropriate?