Today i’ve tried to make a structure, place it on a 22.5 angle… all seems to work well until I play it in game, when everything becomes distorted like in the following image:
Is this just a limitation of the Quake 3 Engine, or is there a way around this?
This is what the structure is supposed to look like.
You have to be very careful when rotating brushwork off-axis (not perpendicular to the grid axis) - 90 and 45 are relatively safe, anything else runs greater risk of corruption, relatively fine detailing in particular (window-frames etc.). If you can’t use a more friendly angle convert the brushwork to a model and use that way. A bit more involved but it at least ensures the structure appears the way you want it.
The Quake 3 engine is very limited by today’s standards. I’ve had to condense all of the levels in my Operation Deathshead project, just to have it playable.
[QUOTE=WL6;472223]How does one go about that?[/QUOTE]Basically you export selected brush work from Radiant (as *.obj or by converting/compiling), import that into a 3D app of choice, fix up, prep and export back out to a suitable format (ASE etc) for use in Radiant… If you don’t know about this (or you don’t have to inclination to bone up on it) you’re best bet is to redesign the level to not use relatively obscure rotations unfortunately, which may be a more realistic proposition.
I have an inclination to get into Blender, unfortunately when I tried to install it on this computer the other day something VERY strange happened: my CPU usage was constantly on 100% (when not using Blender), and the computer became almost impossible to use… not sure what went wrong there, but I’m worried about installing it again in case it happens.
Not sure what’s going on there with the system slowing down, but if you want to do the above, you export from Radiant then fiddle about (like this), or build the section of the map in Blender and export to *.map (support varies for this). Either way you’ll have a bit of learnamcation to do.
Other than the angle issue, are there any other limitations one should consider before embarking on any serious level design? Is there a list anywhere online? It would be great to understand the limitations prior to designing so as to know what is feasible.
The games power by the engine are your best guide. Having said that, if you’re doing single player levels for RtCW your single most important consideration will be if you use Q3Map or Q3Map2; using the latter will mean having to break your levels into smaller segments to avoid the shader overflow bug (search this forum for info on that) but better looking maps (assuming proper use of compiling options). The former means larger levels but not as good looking.
I think SSF Sage sent obsidian a map infected with the shader overflow bug, so the Q3map2 dev team can hopefully (and finally) fix the bug for the new version of Radiant. If there is no news on this eventually, then I’ll send obsidian a pm. I would love to use Q3map2 if the bugs with Rtcw sp can be fixed.
Is there a limit to the number of Brushes that can be displayed at once?
Is there a limit to the number of brushes that are allowed?
It doesn’t quite work like that. Whilst there are general limitations associated with compiling a level (search the forum as they’ve been discussed here before), those limitations don’t necessarily have any immediate affect on what you see moment to moment in-game because of things like surface culling and other render optimisation, in other words, you don’t see the entire map (brushwork) all the time.
If you really want to get into the technicalities of this search and research need to become your best friends, the Quake 3 Engine is probably one of the most well documented engines out there, so it’s just a question of taking some time to bone-up on that and find what you need (you could even look at the freely available source code, the limitations are hard coded there iirc).
If you wish to work on angles with brushes, you cannot make a straight house and rotate it. You must use Vertex edit tool (press V) to manually edit every vertex of every brush, so they keep in the grid. You must build the house straight in angle, not rotate any parts of it. Use ctrl+G to snap the vertices to the grid if you use any rotating tools. Keep the grid as big as possible. Never go below 1 grid. Usually 8 units is the best, but sometimes smaller details need 4 or smaller. Also the more angles you keep 45 the easier it is for you.
This information comes from the GPL Wolfenstein source code. I’m working on documenting the BSP file format, so this is an excerpt from my notes:
BSP file format for Quake 3 / Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Map limits for Wolfenstein:
Models - 1024
Brushes - 32,768
Entities - 2048
Shaders - 1024
Areas - 256
Planes - 65,536
Nodes - 65,536
Brush sides - 65,536
Leafs - 65,536
Leaf faces - 65,536
Leaf brushes - 65,536
Portals - 65,536
Lighting - 4,194,304
Type /shaderlist in the console to see the list of shaders. If there are more than 1024, you will get the shader overflow problem, usually when you fire a machine gun or take a hit. Changing from lightmap to vertex lighting will reduce the shader count.
Since we’re on the topic of limitations, has obsidian and the Q3map2 devs made any progress with fixing the Q3map2 shader overflow bug? Sage, you said you would send a shader overflowed map to obsidian. How did that go?
It is added in the issue tracker. But afaik is still waiting to be looked at.
If you want to be up to date with this, I suggest you to subscribe to this ticket:
Edit: Ninja’d the time I find the link x)
Thanks for the information, Sage and Mateos. It seems that Rtcw sp isn’t the only game to have the shader overflow bug. I pray that the bug gets fixed, so I can use the new Gtk Radiant and Q3map2.
Changes to q3map2 still won’t fix the shader limit of 1,024 that’s compiled into every Wolfenstein SP. The easiest fix for the “folks at home” to do is to get the GPL source code, bump that number up to 2,048 or so, and recompile. You can now map away to your heart’s content.
IMO, that’s the best solution: just release a new version of Wolfenstein SP. We’ve got the source for Windows and Mac OS X.