alt0191
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Flowing Water/Stream
« on: March 14, 2005, 10:17:17 AM »
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Alright heres a tuff one. Maybe? How can i make water flow in a direction such as a small stream. Will it cause a great amout of lag/slow the map down considerably? Is it worth the effort and loss of speed?
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Deuce
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Re:Flowing Water/Stream
« Reply #1 on: March 14, 2005, 10:29:50 AM »
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you would need to use an animated texture for movement such as water.. the halflife wad has such examples of this.. if you want to make your own, it involves naming your textures with +1something, +2something.. or something like that.. i dont have wally on this computer to actually check the naming of it, but im sure grounded knows it off hand.
it shouldnt add a great amount of slowdown to the map, except for the extra polys usually added when using such an entity.
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Grounded
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Re:Flowing Water/Stream
« Reply #2 on: March 14, 2005, 10:46:42 AM »
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There shouldn't be any problem with slowdown.
You don't actually need animating textures either. Copy the water texture you want to use into a new wad and change its name to 'scroll_water' or something that has 'scroll' at the start. Then create your stream using this texture and tie it to func_conveyor. The attributes of the func_conveyor then control the speed and direction of the stream. Make sure you tick the Not Solid flag if you want people to walk through the water 
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Deuce
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Re:Flowing Water/Stream
« Reply #3 on: March 14, 2005, 11:05:26 AM »
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perhaps im misunderstanding what he means.. i thought by "stream" as in the texture of the water actually shows movement of the water, instead of the scroll effect that the normal water entity has.
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alt0191
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Re:Flowing Water/Stream
« Reply #4 on: March 14, 2005, 11:18:23 AM »
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Well the water shows movement fine. Its the conveyer thing that i was after. There is a stream of water in the middle of my map and i would prefer it to move from one end to the other rather than just kinda waving around in one spot. =). The map is at night and im using the space for the sky but i cant seem to get just the right color. Any suggestions?
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Grounded
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Re:Flowing Water/Stream
« Reply #5 on: March 14, 2005, 11:59:12 AM »
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perhaps im misunderstanding what he means.. i thought by "stream" as in the texture of the water actually shows movement of the water, instead of the scroll effect that the normal water entity has.
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Normal water (func_water) doesn't scroll, it deforms. Using a texture with 'scroll' in the name allows proper scrolling from one side of a brush to the other, like a stream flowing. The deforming water effect is produced by the ! prefix in the texture name.
As for the space sky thing are you asking about values for the light_environment? If so you could try pure white with a really low brightness, like 5, although I'm not sure how that would look. Pale blue with a low brightness is usually ok for night maps.
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alt0191
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Re:Flowing Water/Stream
« Reply #6 on: March 14, 2005, 12:04:32 PM »
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between changing the brightness and the color of blue i just cant ever get it right. as of now the brightness is 11, so i guess ill try changing the brightness rather than the color at this point. I've been working on this map for close to a week now and it is just getting rather irritating. Thanks for all of your help though. It is going to make the final product much better.
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Re:Flowing Water/Stream
« Reply #7 on: March 14, 2005, 01:03:06 PM »
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Here is the light_environment setting on one of my night maps: 13 47 89 20. It uses a city sky, so it might still need tweaking.
Why don't you post a couple of pictures?
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alt0191
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Re:Flowing Water/Stream
« Reply #8 on: March 14, 2005, 03:00:07 PM »
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Heres some shots. As far as the stream goes i couldnt seem to get it to work so that I could still swim around in it. So I will just save that for another map. I did'nt put everything together correctly so some of the textures dont line up right. I don't know how to make sure certain areas are dark yet either. But here ya go. I used the color light that you posted and turned the brightness down to 15. I think I might still go a little lower but for now i have already spent about 3 hours alone compiling today so i'm going to take a break for a while. I take that back here is one shot, my pics are too big.
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alt0191
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Re:Flowing Water/Stream
« Reply #9 on: March 14, 2005, 03:01:50 PM »
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I noticed on the last pic the graph is up and the fps is bad. There is only a few spots in the map it is bad, and its really not that bad. Besides my vid card is onboard 64mb =(
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alt0191
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Re:Flowing Water/Stream
« Reply #10 on: March 14, 2005, 03:03:09 PM »
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The area closest to the building is deep the other water is shallow. The water in the very center is deep as well.
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Re:Flowing Water/Stream
« Reply #11 on: March 14, 2005, 04:38:16 PM »
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If you made the water non-transparent your fps would probably improve. HL isn't great at big areas so you have to optimise like crazy to make them playable.
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zeus
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Re:Flowing Water/Stream
« Reply #12 on: March 14, 2005, 10:20:47 PM »
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looking good man 
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alt0191
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Re:Flowing Water/Stream
« Reply #13 on: March 23, 2005, 02:14:10 PM »
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I have come to the conclusion that this map is going to have to be scrapped. I like it alot but for the most part I don't think optimizing will fix the r_speeds without losing its integrity as the map intended. All tutorials on r_speeds seem to be contradicting of themselves. My trial and error has shown wpoly mounts to get higher rather than lower. The only thing that i have seemed to be able to change is size amount that viz and rad go through. yet somehow with smaller kb it seems to take longer to compile. The only thing i have left to try to figure out is hint and skip brushes. All tutorials i have found on that just dont seem to explain how to use them correctly in a very clear way. wpoly and epoly are about 2000 each. Map ranges from 30 to 80 frames a second. I cant get bots to work either so its hard to tell what it will do with the players on it as well as my problem with it crashing sometimes. Im still unsure of what was or is causing it. I think i fixed it again but im still not sure because I cant make a bunch of people keep deleting it and downloading it again. Stupid podbot for some reason wont let me save my waypoint file it just crashes everytime. Even then they would probably only stand there and bunny hop. GaaaaAHHHhh any idea on a more modern standard for wpoly and epoly? some say 200- 400 others say as much as 800 but all say that is outdated compared to machines these days. So what are the target numbers?
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Re:Flowing Water/Stream
« Reply #14 on: March 23, 2005, 02:22:23 PM »
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wpoly: wpoly limits are imposed by the HL engine itself, not the machine. If you start exceeding 800 in high traffic areas you can create lag even on high-end machines.
HINT brushes: there is a fairly good tutorial on countermap.counter-strike.net. It is a fairly advanced topic though.
waypoints: If you add the 'nosave' switch to the waypointsave function you can save even with errors. Check the podbot docs to be sure of the command.
"My trial and error has shown wpoly mounts to get higher rather than lower."
What were you trying when the polys went up? HINT brushes cause face-splitting like any other types of world brushes so they have to be used very carefully. One simply method for reducing poly count is to scale up textures. This is usually quite effective for things like water.
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alt0191
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Re:Flowing Water/Stream
« Reply #15 on: March 23, 2005, 02:41:34 PM »
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I tried making different brushes into func_wall, that only seemed to make the count go up. Why I don't know. Making 1 unit gaps did improve things a little all around, but there is'nt much that i can put a 1 unit gap between without it looking funny or because it was already an entity. There is no complex brushes in the map. I'm not real sure on what areas i should make into func_wall because of light and just in general (walls, stairs, floors). All in all i have really only been mapping for a few weeks. I feel that i have learned alot in a small amount of time but its all of the little ins and outs that i need to learn. The small things that can make a big difference.
I will have to go back and see what i can scale up as far as textures go. Ive read not to go higher than 2x, but i have also read dont go past 8x. >?< I know in most cases the 8x wont be applied but still. What would be an acceptable limit with out errors occuring.
I have not even tried using the hint brushes yet because I wanted to have a better understanding of them and how they work before I tried them out.
Podbot I tried the saving parameter previously and it saved but would not load for somereason. Maybe it went to incorrect directory? But I'm pretty sure there is no errors when I try to save. It just starts saving and crashes. I thought maybe it was the installation, reinstalled still no difference. Then I read that it might be the version compared to the version of cs. So I found some thailand 2.6 version and that made no difference either, atleast not in the mentioned sense.
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Re:Flowing Water/Stream
« Reply #16 on: March 23, 2005, 03:52:19 PM »
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This countermap tutorial is fairly good for basic r_speed help:
http://countermap.counter-strike.net/Tutorials/tutorial.php?id=19
You understand how VIS works? Basically when you're compiling VIS.exe (or HLVIS.exe or whatever) is working out which polys you can see from different places in the map. Normal wall brushes 'block' VIS i.e. it knows you can't see through them. When you make a brush a func_wall VIS can now 'see' through it and it won't block line of sight for the VIS calculations. So if you take a big wall and make it func_wall, your player can now 'see' through it and your r_speeds may well go up. func_walling should only be done with small or complicated brushes that touch other brushes, causing them to fragment.
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alt0191
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Re:Flowing Water/Stream
« Reply #17 on: March 23, 2005, 04:03:00 PM »
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Been there, read that.  . I'll get the hang of everything eventually. Is there major changes in the way source is mapped. Or just like more entities with greater capabilities?
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Re:Flowing Water/Stream
« Reply #18 on: March 23, 2005, 06:12:09 PM »
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Dunno. Haven't started source mapping yet since I don't have HL2.
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