nice! 

that is really really awesome looking (and sounding!) spirit.

i actually remember when you first posted that like... a couple of years ago, and it's still great. it's amazing what a few sounds and flickering lights can do. 

anyone got a dl link handy? I seem to have lost my installer :P

Also, I just upgraded to an i7 system at Christmas so if anyone has any vis-killing maps they want compiled feel free to throw them my way and I'll throw them at it :) 

I think it's there. 

 

I'm having a really strange and annoying problem with a particular section in my map. The player won't step up the third stair step in the image, even though it's the same height (16 units) as the other steps, but when hugging the wall it works, otherwise the player has to jump up the step. Weird thing is this staircase was copied from another area, and the other one works just fine. I even tried making it from scratch again, deleting the curved walls and trim surrounding it to see if that would fix the problem, but no luck. No thin faces/microbrushes/etc shows up in error searches either.

http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/9302/tmpquark000070.jpg

my brain 

The way the stairs is build certainely create a clip that prevent the player to move forward.
It happens generally at the junction of 2 polygons... It happens sometimes.

What you can do is to add a very tiny clip brush onto the faulty are in order cover the stair and prevent the issue....
You can also check the polygon corner coordinates to check whether it is still on-grid after copy-paste... and correct it if it is not the case... 

I have some armour resting on a 16 unit wide bar. When I load the map, it is not there and I do not see a 'bonus item fell out of level' message. Is there a minimum amount of 'support' that is required to hold armour in place - I tried a clip brush and that had no effect.

I have a horrible feeling that this is one of those things that everyone else knows about except me! 

Maybe try making the stairs a func_wall, or even making each stair a func_wall? Spiral staircases are pain :-/ 

I think the item needs a ground that's at least four units wider than the bbox - 40*40 in this case. No "fell out" warning suggests the armor only falls through the bar and ends up on the floor below. If you don't want to make the bar wider or make it two, you could use one of those self-removing func_walls to make the armor float on the bar. 

And the armour needs at least 32 head-height 

@JPL: I understood it was a clipping issue, but I didn't get why it was occuring. As I said, I removed the copied stairs and remade them from scratch (and yes, on grid), removed the brushes surrounding the stairs in case they for some reason caused the issue, but it still didn't work. And it only happened to that particular step, no others. Turning them into func_walls did nothing, so I ended up doing as you said and made a small clip brush in front of the offending brush, and that seemed to do the trick. Still have no idea why it occured in the first place though... 

Glad you found a solution ;) 

All items need a total height of 60 (4 higher than their bbox). So maybe the 16 bar wasn't the problem, just the low ceiling? This my editors that only display the models are counterproductive and the reason so many maps have missing items and stuck monsters. 

*This is why 

Which wall did you have to hug in order to walk up normally?

The fact that you could jump up them makes me think it's not a clipping issue with the geometry in that shot, but with something else intruding into the space.

That the stairs were copied and working elsewhere is suspicious as well.

The clip brush is a slope?

Also, I can't tell from the shot, but it looks like on the right the interesection of the brushes might be off grid. I doubt that'll cause the problem you were having, but its worth bearing in mind that on grid doesn't just mean the corners but also where the edges of brushes cross each other. 

I think it's more or less one of QBSP quirks. It doesn't matter if the stairs work somewhere else in the map or anything. Inexplicable clipping at brush edges tends to occur as a becomes more complex maps. Usually at horizontally angled (45�) walls - that's why it's recommended to hug all of such walls or columns once during beta ttesting. Sometimes c/p or remaking the area in question helps as the new brushes are then at the bottom of the .map file. Putting a thin clip wedge at the conflicting spot is the most reliable solution (for sometimes rebuilding the area only makes the clipping issue go away temporarily). You may find that blocking most of the map out with a large brush will make the stairs work fine, but once the full map is compiled again, it'll be back. 

Yup, you're right. Raised the ceiling and the 16 wide bar is fine. Thanks for the (tee hee) heads-up. 

items could really have used a 'nophysics' flag. most of the time, they will never ever have physics run on them; they could have just been set to movetype_none. 

Quoth entities etc.

Possible to teleport the player but make it completely silent? (Removing the particle effect would be a plus) 

 

@ijed: Could hug both the concave wall on the right and the convex on the left. I as well thought it could be someting other than the stair in question that caused the issue, that's why I tried deleting the step to see if the issue persisted. And nope, as soon as it was gone nothing blocked the player's movement. Again, the error occured even if I remade the step from scratch.

The clip brush is not a slope, here's a picture of how it looks in the editor: http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/1210/quarkclipping.jpg

With the intersecting brushes, I take it you mean where the curvy white walls meet? They are in fact on grid, both the corners and the intersection.

@negke: So as the amount of detail in maps increases, so may issues like these? If I block out certain details with completely square clip brushes (such as lightning fixtures or computers dug into a wall) throughout the map, would that help eliminate such errors? I was thinking of doing this after I finished up the entire map's brushwork, but maybe I'll do it earlier.

Also, my map is now fullbright because I haven't bothered sealing it yet, the outside areas have no sky for instance. Could the amount of faces (i.e the ones pointing out towards the void that would otherwise not be rendered when the map is sealed) contribute to the error at hand? 

That looks like Quark. Doesn't that editor use fractional coordinates for brush faces and thus needs its own BSP compiler? Maybe that compiler simply has more bugs than the more evolved versions that we have today? 

Yeah, it's Quark. I don't know if it needs to use a different BSP compiler, I use Txqbsp and I've had no other problems than these stairs so far. 

The issues may potentially come up, but they really seem to occur quite arbitrarily. Blocking off geometry with clip brushes will not fix them. Sealing the map may. Ultimately, what you did with the extra clip step is the way to go.