Radar Lightning

(Diego) #1

I’ve imported the Lightning Entity setup from Radar for my nighttime version of Praetoria 1. It technically works fine. Thunder and Lightning works ok. But I’m curious as to why in Radar, the lightning only seems to flash in certain areas of the map - like the truck area and the area around the East Radar Dish. But in my map, the lightning flashes everywhere.

The Dlight entities are connected to some Misc Vis Dummies. I’ve never used those entities before and I don’t know what they do. But I have them in my map and I just spread them out a bit like they are in Radar. But they are not necessarily in areas of isolated vis.

Anyway, I don’t mind that everything flashes, it looks cool. I’m just concerned about whether or not that might cause some unnecessary lag. I don’t notice any FPS drops when I run the map locally. Anyone else tried using those entities.

(Qualmi) #2

probably you need a vis compiled map for it to work. the dummys are simply entities which fire the lighting when a player is in sight. that means if the player dont sees any, caus the area between the player and the dummy is visblocked, you wont get any lightning.

(Diego) #3

It is vis compiled. But the map is very open.

(zbzero) #4

I know his is the wrong post to write something about you praetoria one but i have problems in your map, i never played this map before but i saw the pics and i think is a very good and cool map, so i try to put it running on my NQ server and didnt work, my server just crashed, after i see that problem i think maybe its a incompatibily in NQ and this map and i go to test it on my etpro server and again its crashed my server, so maybe you help me to put it working!!!
The only error i got in both servers is that
Enable spawning!
Warning: [target_001] setstate [target_001_debris] called and no entities found
Warning: [target_002] setstate [target_002_debris] called and no entities found

ERROR: G_FindConfigstringIndex: overflow: [ /textures/praetoria/icons/cm_praetoria_southdoor.tga ] [ 576 ] [ 32 (cur 32) ] [ qtrue ]

----- Server Shutdown -----
Anyone have any idea why this happen?

(Diego) #5

The odd thing is that most of the servers that I see running praetoria_one are all NQ servers. However, I know that the map will give you a max gamestate chars error if there are too many players -like more than 24. But I’ve never experienced that kind of problem just starting the map up. Could it be a hunkmegs thing?

I’m releasing a new version of the map this week. The new one fixes some obvious bugs like those setstate errors, as well as some bugs that I never knew were in there. It also has a few slight tweaks to the spawns to increase the pressure that allies can put on the axis when blowing the generator.

But the main reason for the new version was to update the entities and simplify them to try to reduce gamestate usage. That basically includes reducing the character length of things like custom sounds, paths, entity names, VO flags, etc. Using Jaymod to check my gamestate status, praetoria_one starts off using 65% gamestate and ends up at 72% with just me in the game running all the objectives on my dev install of ET. The new version starts out around 58% and ends up at about 64-65%.

So anyway, the final compile for version 2 finished last night. So I just need to pack it up and get it uploaded somewhere. I’ll try to do that either tonight or tomorrow. Then you can check it out to see if you still get that error.

(kamikazee) #6

VIS dummies are used to keep the object they’re linked to in the player’s active view.

That’s fhe theory. Let’s look at a case studyP the truck in goldrush. If you take a look at the truck that map you’ll see it is surrounded by them.
It turns out that the Q3 engine does not draw models when it doesn’t need to. So, when the truck model’s origin goes out of view, fhe whole model will disappear. Say you would walk up to the driver’s cab and the model vanishes, and when you turn around it pops back into view…

This is bothersome with objects which need to be seen up close from lots of different angles. The dummies will make sure that as long as they are in the player’s view the model won’t disappear.

Now I wonder why you’d need them for lightning entities…

(zbzero) #7

Ok thx a lot man!
I have setup on my command line of my server 256 mb and im a running these servers in my own dedicated server so i think isnt the hunkmegs problem but i will wait this new release to test it again.