Snapshot
October 12, 2008 · Print This Article
Cyber-stalking help, October 2008:
Reading… Anathem (Neal Stephenson). Hard to get into, but it’s picking up steam.
Watching… Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles (Season 1). 49ers games.
Playing… Nothing. Waiting for GoW2, Fable II and Fallout 3!
Looking Forward To… Maui vacation 
One more month…
Hoping… that the Phillies sweep the Dodgers to win the NLCS! Well, I just want them to win the series, but a sweep would be sweet.
Finishing… Beyond Belief 2008. I think. Current VIS time on Intel DualCore 2.6Ghz: 13 hours…
“Finishing… Beyond Belief 2008. I think. Current VIS time on Intel DualCore 2.6Ghz: 13 hours…”
And to think, I get impatient with my 1 minute VIS time of a dm map… Looks like when I go for a non-1on1-dm map, particularly an sp map, I should look into getting a separate machine just to compile…
Luckily computers are so fast these days that I can do a “vis -fast” on the level and it’s still fully playable. I only have to do the full vis every week or so to check the final result. But it’s annoying, and shows that the concept of PVS is simply flawed for FPS games. 90% of that vis time comes from those stupid mountains and a cave area – areas that the player never enters, but vis computes the occlusion for it regardless. Stupid!
Then again, compared to 11 years ago it’s heaven! I remember bbelief5 taking a full day and a half to vis back in the days. And that was before multithreading, when the operation completely shut down the computer
These days, I usually just run one thread over night, and I can still use the computer in the meantime.
That sounds like a case for some custom tools, where the editor could be used to mark things for vis to… care less about. Such as distant organic structures like that.
Huh, that kinda makes me feel bad for running through bbelief5 so quickly this weekend, giving a friend a brief highlighting of all of BB. Its amazing how much time can be put into things so quickly consumed. I’ve spent a day and a half on my map remix, and it can be consumed in a mere 30 seconds…
Yep, but that’s how it’s always been, hasn’t it? I did some work-related budgeting the other day and we came up with something like “1 hour of final gameplay per designer on the project”. That’s 15-18 months of somebody’s life, and the audience will play through it in an hour! But of course that time is multiplied by the number of people who play the game/level. Hundreds, thousands or even millions – so the time investment becomes worth it again.
Oh well, even today some maps take days and weeks to VIS. Luckily, Bengt Jardrup’s VIS has an autosave function which let’s you cancel and resume the process at any time – no need to keep the computer on all the time like back in the day. Turning stuff into func_walls reduces VIS time, sometimes drastically, but I wouldn’t recommend it for the rocks (not least because of lighting reasons).
I’ve been using Bengt’s VIS – very useful to turn off the laptop and take it to work without killing the vis
And I went on a wild func_wall rampage a few weeks ago, only to realize that it didn’t make sense for nearly as many brushes as I hoped it would. Still have some func_walls, but you’re right that the mountains totally don’t make sense. Unfortunately 