Several things:

1 - Somebody PLEASE do a multithread vis for windows. All of you Mac users are getting off on this and rubbing your cocks in glee. We need to make a stand!!! I would do it, but I aint no computer science student, I cant even do QuakeC, and I dont know where to start with compiling from Willems source code. (Did you create that youself BTW Willem?)

2 - Than, your too smart to need a long compile time. Your maps are soo fucking good that you dont need to resort to trying to blow peoples mind with the biggest wide open space. Your maps are just classy.

3 - JPL, Sickbase took 6 and a half days on an Athlon XP1700! CDA would have taken longer on my machine! What did you do for 2 months, aside from tear your hair out, and try to block out the sound of the CPU fans?

4 - Willem, Sickbase was not nice to Quake. Its not nice for anyone! For starters you cant play it, cause it only runs in AguirRes modified GLQuake, or his NehWarp engine is better. I dont think its OSX compatible ATM. Also, the only person who managed to do a Nightmare Hundred Percent run was Sielwolf, who, from what I can gather, has been in hiding ever since. And I have the demos on my hard drive(s), but he told me not to post them. He didnt say anything about not emailing them though....
What I mean is its too hard for you, Willem.

5 - Rudl how long is Fast vis? What is your processor and what vis tool do you use? 

All of you Mac users
All two of them? 

JPL, Sickbase took 6 and a half days on an Athlon XP1700! CDA would have taken longer on my machine! What did you do for 2 months, aside from tear your hair out, and try to block out the sound of the CPU fans?

What I did ? nothing with my home PC (except internet and email accesses), but fortunately I installed QuArK / Quake / etc... on my office laptop, in order to start something else.... Did you think I was just waiting for 1218 hours in front of my PC screen doing nothing ? Come on, be serious ... 

" (Did you create that youself BTW Willem?) "

I didn't do a whole lot in reality. I just fixed up the function calls and type names that Carmack already had in the code so that they worked on OSX. I don't know/think it would be that easy on Windows but it would certainly be worth someone's time to do it! Many people would benefit. 

But if a map takes more than 24 hours to compile there should be a good reason for it. Marcher had probably the biggest area yet in Q1, outside of a test or beta map and it took a week.

Noclipping around you can see how well optimised it is, whereas eg. Sickbase wasn't so much. I'm not having a go at you Ricky, because the improvement in the Hand was obvious, in all ways.

I think its worth remembering that good mapping isn't good visuals and gameplay alone, but also the technical side of using the tools efficiently to produce the best results.

I know alot of the old Quake sites are 404 but even so a Google for bsp tutorials will still turn up a lot of the old stuff which was thought through back when people were compiling on 486's. Granted we've moved on in the amount of processing power available, but that's not to say that the old methods are now invalid. 

I agree. It's still the same engine at its core and since nobody is rewriting QBSP or VIS, the old techniques and optimization rules still apply. 

5 - Rudl how long is Fast vis? What is your processor and what vis tool do you use?


Several minutes.
Processor is an AMD 6000+ X2
and I use aguirRe's tools 

Marcher had probably the biggest area yet in Q1, outside of a test or beta map and it took a week.

*cough* qte1m1 and m2 *cough* 

made already in 1998 a DM level Kasteel that allegedly took five weeks to do a level 2 vis on a sun ultrasparc 300MHz.

Some years later I did a level 4 vis of the same map in three days on a PIII 600. On JPL's system it'd probably take less than a day now ... 

Bambuz: Thanks, I got gimp running fine now. Xnview is rather good, but the convert part of it is badly documented. With gimp, at least I know how to use it.

The problem is, even when I raise brightness by 50 and contrast by 35 percent, you can't really see any more in the shots. :-/ A tiny bit more, perhaps. It may have to do with the fact that I'm using software rendering with its smack-dark shadows. GLquake looks almost drastically different.

I'm also using tyrlite which seems to enhance the shadows, not the brightness, which I like for this map... using Lord Havoc's light tool for example, it's radically different, almost a radiosity effect like in Quake 2. I could play with different falloff settings etc I guess, but if I did just for the screenshots, they would look nothing like the actual map, which kinda defies the purpose :-)

When it's time, I'll organize some good-looking shots. 

Do not tinker around with Brightness and Contrast, that will look like poo (or take too much time). Instead use the layers -> curves tool. You can save the curve for later usage to save more time. 

Seriously, if you guys code up an EM64T-compatible linux multithreaded executable, I'll run it on our supercomputer. I'm curious to see compile times! 

Practically 0 vis-blocking.
I'm learning still. New map also hs some high detail wide open bits, but I'm trying to bend all of the corridors leading away from it. In Fitz I type r_showtris 1 then run around the map, seeing where the slow spots are.

Rudl - I think my 6 and a half day spout was a 6-7 minute fast vis. I think.

Inertia - trying to get people to code things for us is not easy. I ask all of the time. The ones who are capable just dont listen. I guess they think I'm lazy or ignorant or something. I'd like to think that some coders are working on some new stuff which we would like, but are saving it for a surprise.

I'd like to hear what a supercomputer can do to vis times too!!

AguirRe - I'm glad I didnt make Sickbase on a p133 with 16mb ram. 

I forgot - need to play again. 

Hey would someone be willing to send me one of these ridiculously huge VIS time maps so I could fool with it in ToeTag? I would need the WADs as well of course.

If not, that's cool, but I'd be curious to see what could be done to improve VIS times without huge restructurings. 

I have a map that takes over 30 hours to complete. Do you want just the .bsp and wad file? 

Well, I would need the MAP file so I could look at the brush work. If you're willing to send that and the WAD files to me, that would be awesome.

willem at wantonhubris 

 

For some reason, I am unable to send you the email. I have tried to sent it twice already, and each time I did I got a "Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender" a minute later.

Is something wrong on your end? 

Not sure.

try warren at wantonhubris if willem isn't working. 

Upscale the water texture 

Still isn't working Willem. warren at wantonhubris gives me the same error. Any other methods we can try? 

The warp .map source is available at the shub-hub:

http://shub-hub.com/files/misc/mapsource_080507.7z

With the zip password - warpspasm

They're fairly big maps but the vis time isn't over five hours, warpc is the longest at around that, just because its alot of connected stuff with some dodgy vis-blocking thrown in.

If you want to experiment with it then let me know which map and I can extract a Wadfile tonight. 

Orl

I dunno, I sent myself an email just now and it hasn't bounced. Not sure what to tell you.

Maybe do the shub-hub thing that ijed did. Post a link and I'll grab it tonight. 

I uploaded the map onto my web space temporarily. You can grab it here: http://orl.fvfonline.com/misc/oms23.zip

Let me know when you got it.