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Hall Of Mirrors Fix
This tut will cover how to kill those hall of mirror (HOM) bugs
There are 2 main causes of HOM
1 is not using DETAIL brushes on complex brush work
2 portals not being split into small enough area's
The first one is pretty self explanatory, e.g.. When you have
a table leg made from a cone, it should be a detail brush
In case yon have never used this function, CTRL+M will make your
SELECTED brush/'s detail, and to view detailed brushes hit CRTL+D
to toggle them in/out of view
Second error, well I belief its a compiler error, but as we don't
have any support for kingpin, so we are going to have to live
with it.
The error comes from a portal not been split, or miss calculated
in bsp/vis.
A portal in an invisible area/box that is created during the bsp
process, allot of things effect the way these boxes are made,
and HINT brushes are 1 of them
I will show you my way to fix HOM's with the correct use of HINT
brushes.
Test map will kpdm4, it has a HOM that is easily fixed.
In this picture you
will see the PINK area, this is the HOM, but in developer
mode with GL_CLEAR "1" and GL_FOG "0"
With out these command's you will see the HOM effect. |
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To fix the error you need to locate the faulty portal, pretty
easy if your told :), its actually where YOU are standing
If the location of the HOM is not overly complex and with angled
brushes, we should be safe to proceed with simple hint placement
First I will show
you a portal that is at cause
There is a plugin's for q3Rad that will view portals
Though I do not have the source for kpdm4, the bsp recompile
still revealed the portal at fault.
In this picture there is the yellow lines, they are from q3Rad
.prt (portal) viewer. The red arrows point to the portal that
is the cause to this HOM. |
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Even with out Q3rad this portal could be fixed with common sense.
Just think of were you are standing, run around in the area that
reveals the HOM
were can you walk in the portal, that LEADS to an area, which canot
see the HOM (brushes blocked your view)
Its in between those can/canot see the HOM location that needs the
portal split
Now for the hint placement.
We need to SPLIT the portal along the adjacent wall that the HOM
is on .
| PIC 1 |
PIC 2 |
PIC 3 |
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| PIC 4 |
PIC 5 |
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In pic 3, I am showing the adjacent wall that needs a portal running
along it to split our faulty portal
Pic 4 and 5 would be the hint placement suited to this job, my
choice in hint would be the example in Pic4, and use all sides
of brush hinted
The height of the hint should be at least the height of the corridor
that the HOM is in, but can go all the way up to the sky.
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Pic 6
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Pic 7 |
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Pic 6 & Pic 7 are examples of in editor hint placement
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