MinusTankMeUp

[Maniac]

Ok, v0.5 is out...
Here are the changes:
- refactored the blocking volumes at map edges. They are still pretty clumsy and can be improved a lot, but at least now they don't make you think about suicide or homicide;
- removed all physics/leaving battlefield volumes from roofs. I hope to make some improvements about roofs, but using not-working 0.5 dmg/sec with Leaving Battlefield message is not the best way to prevent roof camping;
- removed some unused volumes which serve no apparent need;
- anti-portals in buildings seem to be OK, I can't think of better shapes (actually I can, but I greatly doubt that wasting another day or two to make them perfect will give any visible effect on FPS)
- removed stray health and link ammo pickups, they are to be replaced with Kegs and CustomWeaponLockers later;
- removed Hammerheads, they are to be replaced with Cicadas. I still do not want to add too many fliers, but maybe one or two on other nodes will do.

Thanks to Cat for RGB8 render suggestion, it transformed 45MB -> 35MB
Still searching for a way to replace projector material from script.
A question to modders: is there a reason to have two big walls and a piece of land under the BSP or is it just garbage?
Also, one more question about textures: there is texture on buildings, part of which shows windows as fake "mirrors", but the reflexted texture is daylight one. How can I edit it to reflect correct map state or make a replacement?

[GLoups!]

Also, one more question about textures: there is texture on buildings, part of which shows windows as fake "mirrors", but the reflexted texture is daylight one. How can I edit it to reflect correct map state or make a replacement?

You must change the cubemap textures, in texture browser mylevel.REEFLEGS.x, can't find any tutos for cubemaps in english, but you can google-translate this.
Or just take screenshots at the same place, work it with photoshop or any image editor, and replace the textures without rename them.

Edit :or this.

[Cat1981England]

- anti-portals in buildings seem to be OK, I can't think of better shapes (actually I can, but I greatly doubt that wasting another day or two to make them perfect will give any visible effect on FPS)

Anti-portals should ideally be simple square or rectangular cubes, it's not often that anything more complex improves performance. They also need to be placed correctly and be large enough to justify their cost-to-benefit as clients need to calculate what will and won't be rendered for every one.

I know it seems as if it's a waste of time, but every extra fps, the less data clients need to send/receive and the smaller the map/dependencies - all add up to a more enjoyable experience for the players. We've spent the last 5 years maximising the server's performance by finding the best location in Europe, getting the best hardware available, optimising server settings and optimising maps. I'd be happy to do this myself once you've finished editing if you like, but unless we squeeze every bit of performance out of the map without impacting on visual quality or gameplay - it will never be ready to go on the server.

is there a reason to have two big walls and a piece of land under the BSP or is it just garbage?

They look like the ground on the non-playing area of the map. All of the sides should be set to unlit though in surface properties.

[Maniac]

2Gloups: thanks a lot, i'll try it. Good thing it is not a special pre-made baked texture.

2Cat: There must be something I don't quite understand about antiportals then. At first, I think you'll have to review my edit anyway - there must be many things I didn't notice and there may be things I did wrong. E.g., I am not still sure what is better - 4 big blocking volumes around the map and little additions to them where some buildings are, or bunch of big simple-shaped volumes from every border line turn to end of map, or 4 big volumes with non-cubic shape...

Back to antiportals: as I understand it, they cancel rendering of objects which are fully blocked in raytracing by single antiportal volume. So, an ideal AP is a big plane which is most of the time is normal to player's line of sight, e.g. the wall at Bitchslap.

The real-life ideal AP is one which blocks the most objects from all directions, namely a sphere, or, for sake of math performance, a cube. Still, AFAIK, graphics engines work with (mostly) raytracing, so, in theory, any convex polyhedron would do - because the projection of volume on the plane, normal to line of view, is counted, and it goes down to creating a n-sided polygon and tracing through it.

There is warning that AP's are always drawn as cubes which surround the volume vertices, but it seems to be true only for older UT versions (as Wormbo states there). On MTMU there are trapezoid-shaped buildings, so the AP cube to fit inside one will be ~2 times smaller than the building itself (if measured from normal to a broad side), so less space will be covered; and, knowing the big size of map, it is not good.

So, where did I go wrong and why should antiportals be cubes? I base my considerations on what I know (not as much as I'd like to) and could find on topic (not very much, too), but it all checks out for me. Is it some UEngine 2.5 feature or do I miss something fundamental?

P.S.: about the server itself: I greatly appreciate what you guys do, and I totally agree that maps have to get as close to perfect as possible. But still, I do not want to change things which are on the edge of my skills - as for me, mindlessly following an advice without understanding what am I doing can with equal probabilities be beneficial and harmful.

[Pegasus]

Butting in for a sec to address this:

[...]Still, AFAIK, graphics engines work with (mostly) raytracing, so, in theory, any convex polyhedron would do[...]

To my knowledge, in the vast majority of cases throughout video games' history up till now, rendering has been done by way of rasterization rather than via ray tracing for the simple reason that the latter is some orders of magnitude more complex a problem that it's (almost) always been deemed too expensive to do in real time, given the commercial hardware available and players' usual framerate/performance expectations. Hell, if even the current console generation's "true 1080p/60fps" drama is anything to go by (in very brief, that's devs still opting to use limited hardware's potential more towards drawing more detailed/high-tex/complex scenery that sells better in print & video promos rather than beefing up frame-rates, which one only ever finds out about post-launch), the typical business calculation in the minds of most project leads (and publishers' marketing departments) should keep right on pointing towards sticking with the traditional way of rendering 3D environments for the foreseeable future, meaning raytracing remains just another academic/non-gaming plaything even if its visual fidelity promises are as luscious as ever. Oh well...

Anyway, sorry for the pedantic n' derailing rant, plz carry on.

[GLoups!]

In order from most expensive to render to easier for the engine: Solid brush add, semi-solid, non-solid, static-meshes without collisions, static-meshes with collisions.

For the static-meshes, it also depends on how many materials it have, by extension this work also for Bsp, they also render less beautiful shadows and lightnings.
The complexity of the textures, resolution, shader, combiner, static or TexPanner, TexRotator etc..

Also the number of different textures on the map, by extension the number of texture-packages(or static-meshes-package) use on the map, if you want to add a brand-new texture from a unused package and if it's the only one for this package, you should abstain or mylevel it in last solution and compress to dxt1 (not work for the alpha or with DDS plugin for photoshop).

As cat already said, numbers of pickup are not good for online play as they increase the number of channel, as well as many stuffs in the game, but it is not desirable to remove all things in the map, otherwise we will play tetris, just delete the superfluous, try to deal with the problems in order of largest to smallest, and only one has faith, until you decide that this is enough, often the biggest issues are those that we see the least on the screen.

For the map we are interested (Minus), remains to define if it lack of optimisations, the predominant, is without a doubt the numbers of solid-brush (blue ones), you can try to convert them (not alls !), ex Brush121 (buildings) to semi-solid step by step, ensuring that it does not bother the Bsp-tree of the map.

The anti-portals are not a form problem Imo -unless they're convex, they've just not semi-solid brush inside for online optimisation.

Fog would have been more fit and prevent the disappearance effect of meshes, but hide the pretty star sky in counter-part.

Beside, good job for the vehicle radar (hope it work online).

Edit: Radical solution and easy to try, convert buildings to static meshes and see what happened, save your map to a different name before doing this for not lose your work, don't forgot to put the 3 array of the collision to false in the static meshe browser otherwise they don't block karma (vehicles) in the static meshes browser, then compare the fps, of course the result will be less good looking shadows.

[Maniac]

2Pegasus:
My bad, I didn't use correct term. What I mean is that rendering is projecting of 3D objects to single 2D plane, so it doesn't really matter (at least I think so) what is shape of 3D antiportal volume if it's 2D projection is same polygon (e.g. a cube with side of x units, viewed from 45 degrees PoV, and a prism (made from half of given cube), viewed from normal to it bigger side, both render to a rectangle with dimensions x * 1.44x).

2GLoups:

...pickups are not good for online play...otherwise we will play tetris

The pickups I deleted are useless anyway, half of them was never used and other half can be combined to Lockers, Health Kegs etc.

Beside, good job for the vehicle radar (hope it work online).

All credits go to Crusha, this one is from his UltimateONSFactory

Radical solution and easy to try, convert buildings to static meshes...

Not sure I'll be able to notice FPS change, but still I'll try it.

EDIT:
Also I wanted to ask, is there a full list of custom vehicles used at CEONSS? I've found Omnipotents vvehicles list, but it is far away from full.

EDIT2:
Is there a neat way to find references to missin resources? It says some cubemap texture is missing, and I want to change it or at least remove it, but I can't find where is it.

[Maniac]

v 0.6 is out and uploaded!

- Closed 3 map holes near Red Base. Maybe there are more... also, that's why a textured cube placed under the map - so holes do not cause HOM or render errors
- Replaced the nodes with SpecialNodes
- Optimized bots waypoints a bit (cleaned up some redundant waypoints, removed some wrong-placed ones)
- Removed Nuke Layer, added 2 Deemers and Ion Painter... somehere
- Changed daylight windows reflections textures to a night one (thanks GLoups! just replacing plain textures worked like a charm)
- Replaced lockers with CustomLockers, also added AVRiL, AVRiL everywhere! (2Cat: yes, the bug occurs only with full ammo - and it works OK with new lockers)

Also, more questions:
- there are some AI scripts on map - anyone knows what is its purpose and is it working at all?
- I want to chagne vehicle models, pls reply which vehicles would you like to see on this map

[Cat1981England]

Thanks for all the info GL

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2Cat: There must be something I don't quite understand about antiportals then

Well the two A-P in the floors at each core are not really blocking much and I think will just add needless calculations. AntiPortalActor170 and 171 are the wrong way round as the broadest side is only blocking the edge of the map.

There is warning that AP's are always drawn as cubes which surround the volume vertices, but it seems to be true only for older UT versions (as Wormbo states there).

Yeah I've read that, but I've also read that they have to be cubes from other prominent individuals. I don't know enough about it to know who's right, but I've not come across a situation where's it's not been possible to play it safe and use a cube.

Radical solution and easy to try, convert buildings to static meshes...

Not sure I'll be able to notice FPS change, but still I'll try it.

Unless it's a square or rectangle converting anything more complex in the editor is generally not a good idea, no harm in trying though. If you do convert and decide to keep them as Static Meshes then you should place Invisible Collision Hulls inside the anti portals, just make them a little smaller.

EDIT:
Also I wanted to ask, is there a full list of custom vehicles used at CEONSS? I've found Omnipotents vvehicles list, but it is far away from full.

Sorry no. It might take a bit of time but you would need to load all the .u files and placed vehicles in a map one by one to get the majority of them. There would still be some that a missing though which have been myleveled.

EDIT2:
Is there a neat way to find references to missin resources? It says some cubemap texture is missing, and I want to change it or at least remove it, but I can't find where is it.

That's always bugged me as well. Anyone know?

- there are some AI scripts on map - anyone knows what is its purpose and is it working at all?

They tell bots what to do in certain situations. So long as the bot pathing is simple and there's nothing complex on the map, they're not really necessary for online play where you've only got 9 bots and they are just there to give people something mildly interesting to shot at until others join.

- I want to chagne vehicle models, pls reply which vehicles would you like to see on this map

Personally I would love to see the Fire (flame?) Badger and Draco on this night map. The Draco for it's close up attack and the FB because it can leave embers on the ground for a few seconds, but mostly because I'm a pyromaniac.

[Maniac]

AntiPortalActor170 and 171 are the wrong way round as the broadest side is only blocking the edge of the map.

Thanks, now that you pointed out individual actors, I see your point. I just didn't check *what* part of map they are blocking Removed AP's from base already, they are surely not good ones. And, about the cubes... Well, I'm one stubborn SoB, so you are welcome to change them to cubes in pre-release editing, but I'll leave them as is

They tell bots what to do in certain situations...

Thinking same here - as there is no obvious use to them, I'd rather remove them at all - this map will need a full new edit if someone will want to make it bot-friendly.

...Personally I would love to see ...

Thanks, noted. Aren't you firedancer by any chance?