i'm not sure which pool exactly you have in mind, but i encountered one pool with this set of items in arcanum3 (not sure, i'll check when i get home) and all the items were knee deep stuck in a bottom of this pool/well. i had to noclip to pick these up (darkplaces).
-
jakub 

..Let's say rough: many people (I for sure) hate Vising their maps simply because is boring, time consuming and liable to errors.

so as a(relatively) new mapper I ask you: IS IT REALLY NECESSARY TO FULL-VIS EVERY MAP ?

replies needed :) 

applies to 95 % of maps 

Ooooh, yeah I think I went into the final wizard room with invisibility, but I assumed that was going to be the final battle and didn't realise you were supposed to run right past them upstairs. I don't search around much - found maybe 4 secrets in the entire pack. So instead I fired a rocket into the toughest, then madly strafed around the room until they were all dead. Couldn't have done it without full lg and ra though. But shit, going upstairs would have been easier!!!

The battle I really liked was those 3 big ogre things that run fucking fast towards you. Basically double-sg only enemies. They were really cool!

The 1st map I didn't like much either. The underground looked good enough, but all the annoying zombies didn't enhance gameplay. And you need to have put the chainsaw in, not a triple-hit-gibbing-axe.

2nd map was great, but got confusing sometimes. After the bridge extended to the sk, I couldn't see how I was supposed to get back up without backtracking over a large amount. Some good fights though.

3rd level was really good, definitely my favourite. battles were tough and epic as well. The textures all looked good.

4th level was good, but it seemed like a huge room filled with lots of different levels and stairs, etc. Which weakened it. Moving into the final area was good though and improved it. The ogres and vores scattered on distant ledges were just a pain in the ass.

5th level was good. The constant noise from the pool was annoying, but apart from that a good final level. Apart from the epic wizard fight it was all pretty easy though.

Anyway great pack! Enemies were all good. The only one I didn't like so much was the super bastard hell knight that blocks all your weapons expect dsg and lg, and fires those red cunt projectiles at you. That's a quickload nightmare taking him on unless you have lots of space for 1-direction-only strafing (which seems to be his only weakness). 

It's good practice to fullvis your stuff for the final release. Find someone with Wvis and a fast machine and ask them to do it for you.

What would be even more awesome is a distributed vis system like Vis@home... � la distcc, only for vis. 

What would be even more awesome is a distributed vis system like Vis@home... � la distcc, only for vis.

Now that would be an awesome idea! 

 

ZHLT netvis does it.
Also the idea is ancient, see http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=4&start=16&end=17

I doubt it would be too reasonable to make this. We got multi-threaded VIS just recently.

MH recently posted somewhere about how a well written modern engine can even be faster with unvised data if I recall correctly. 

> ZHLT netvis does it.

link? 

Unvised is something I might test sometime; it's a tradeoff though. The theory is that you can put the entire world into a big static vertex buffer and draw it without having to send any data to the GPU. Use shaders for water and sky and there is absolutely no need to modify vertexes at run time.

The tradeoff of course is that you'll have extra overdraw, but if bandwidth savings can more than compensate for it then you're in business. 

Always vis a map. Or DIE!!!! 

it's not a problem even for large maps, at least on semi-recent hardware. Overdraw is not so much of a problem as bandwidth usually is (for 3D accelerator cards). 

I'm glad I stayed to play more maps than the first one. The first map was pretty annoying in my opinion.
But the second map!!! Wow! This is a big very amazing map, Good stuff everywere, Good brushwork and texture use and a nice layout! Loved it (but not the wizards!)
I can see from the other comments that the good stuff continues!
Looking forward to play the next maps!
Thank you for making this pack folks! 

maybe i should have added an additional note in the OP: 'if you hate the first map, just skip to arc2!' :P 

it's not a problem even for large maps, at least on semi-recent hardware. Overdraw is not so much of a problem as bandwidth usually is (for 3D accelerator cards).

My thoughts exactly. Early Z and a few other things can work wonders for overdraw. It's not an alternative to fullvis, and will still run slower than fullvis (not least because you still need to exercise your vertex shader in order to get early Z), but at the least it should (could!) eliminate a lot of the badness from no vis. All purely theoretical and not to mention hardware dependent, of course. 

What you mean by early Z. But anyway, I have implemented a VBO renderer that can render for example Vondurs AC without ever looking at the BSP (it loads the map file). It's pretty fast and still has a lot of potential for optimization. 

that's pretty wild, loading it directly from the map file.
perhaps some stress testing with these arcanum maps? :P 

but the map files are in WC format. 

I guess I will play this maps for the next month... love then so much... I'm keeping first demos even when I died in 30 monters or so... anyone want then?

full reply after play then all

But must thanks you guys a lot, this is something I will never make... the quality, layout and bushwork is top is the kind of stuff few guys born for it!

I didn't :) 

Early Z means that the GPU can reject polygons based on depth before it gets to the fragment shader stage; hardware that doesn't support early Z can only reject after the fragment shader. No overdraw, the only overhead is in the vertex shader and primitive assembly, all good stuff. I believe that if you've got hardware T&L then you've also got early Z.

Loading from the map file would be great; you get no surface subdivision so there's none of that horrible heavy tesselation that Quake maps have, and that is a huge cause of slowdown. I believe HL2 stores the original map brushes in the BSP for exactly this reason, and it's something I'd be very in favour of if the community ever did get around to discussing proposals for a replacement BSP format.

Another neat trick - you can turn off backface culling for the world and all brush models. Quake backface culls in the engine anyway, so it's a completely unnecessary test for the GPU. Very small performance gain. 

Can someone with access to Hammer convert those arcanum sources to standard map format? Without the extended rotation shiznit? 

i couldn't load them in 1.6, so i guess it's the hl2 hammer? 

Especially when you land on the giant angel statues and they break ;) 

that was a nice touch. i was pretty surprised when it happened cause i was really focused on trying to make the jump from the spiral stairs to the platforms across the room. :P 

> if the community ever did get around to discussing proposals for a replacement BSP format.

It will.