...I think they're fairly relative.

TBH I dont really know what a leaf is. I sort of assume that it's an "area of the map". The more complex the geometry of the map, the more leafs there will be, right? (somebody help me out here...)

It all equates to more triangles on the screen at any one time which is basically kinda what r_speeds is a measure of?

(its very shady around here...) 

you're not too far off.

qbsp divides the worldspace into many small, convex volumes, some solid (inside a brush) and some non-solid (air, water, etc.) A leaf is a non-solid volume of space in your bsp. As you walk around the level, your viewpoint is always inside a leaf. And vis.exe figures out what other leafs you can see from the leaf you're in, and the game will only draw polygons that are touching one of those other leafs. (each leaf has a list of polygons it touches.)

r_speeds actually counts those polygons as they are being drawn.

If you want to visualize a leaf, imagine the simple case of a cube-shaped leaf. It has 6 sides, and some of those sides will be touching other leafs -- these are portals. Other sides of the cube will be touching solid space -- these are polygons (since there's a visible surface anywhere air meets solid.) For example, a leaf in the corner of a room might touch a floor and two walls, and the other 3 sides are portals. 

The number of triangles shown (=r_speeds) is a lot higher than the number of leafs? 

Not necessarily -- some leafs have no polygons (if they are floating in the middle of the room, for example) so they would increase the leaf count but not the r_speeds.

Also, r_speeds counts polygons, not triangles. Each polygon is made up of 1 or more triangles. (square = 2 triangles, hexagon = 4 triangles, etc.) 

I knew the outlines of that, but is it also right that polygons are split by textures - so a 256 square wall with a 128 texture becomes 8 triangles instead of 2?

Also affected by scaled up / down textures? 

it's true that there is a max size to polygons, based on the amount of texture/lightmap space taken up by it. At texture scale 1.0, the max size is 240 in world units, and anything larger gets split.

But all that splitting happens in qbsp, so when the engine is rendering, each polygon is already verified to be 240x240 or less. 

You can visualize that pretty easily, FYI. Just build a large hollow box, compile it, and load it in Quake.

"r_drawflat 1" will show you the BSP splits and where QBSP cut everything up. 

Probably the most concise yet useful explanation of the process I've ever come across. 

I now know what a portal is! As well as a few other interesting facts...

...next time I compile I will read the log from a slightly different viewpoint.

So "r_showtris 1" in Fitzquake is showing the triangles which comprise the polygons.
I will try "r_drawflat 1" later and see what that looks like. Are there any other things you can do? Like to see the leafs for example?

I am learning the need to know about these things from a mappers point of view. I want my level to be as big as possible but not limited to certain engines. So I'm always looking at the info in the Qbsp log to see how many marksurfaces etc I have got. Also AguirRe's Bspinfo.exe is usefull to me for the same reason. The only way I can find out how many lightmaps I have is by loading in AguirRe's engine, and typing lightmaps on the console. 

Well, "r_draworder 1" is a fun one because it draws the world backwards so you can see exactly what is being drawn from your current location.

I think that about covers it... 

r_draworder is only supported in software engines (winquake, etc.) i believe.

also, you can see lightmap count in fitzquake using "imagelist" command -- they are numbered starting with lightmap00. 

Sorry, I'm a software guy so that's how I roll. :) 

Shomer fucking Shabbos. 

...how many dudes you know roll like this, how many dudes you know flow like this, not many, if any, not many, if
any,

how many dudes you know who got the skills to go in and roarck, a show like this, uh uh, uh uh, I don't know any body.

cept Willem, uh uh, uh uh. 

he likes software... Im sure I saw a load of shots with pretty square pixels somewhere.... 

biff, you're out of your element. 

with GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_NEAREST...

So there's no way to visualize the current PVS in FQ? Maybe a lockPVS like in q3 would be a good addition if you have the time/desire? 

What is/are PVS?
Darkplaces can show portals (r_showportals 1) and surfaces (r_drawsurfaces 1) (might be slightly different cvar names, from the top of my head) in a very appealing way. And thanks to metl's post I have now understood what portals are. 

Spirit

PVS = Potentially Visible Set

Basically, he's asking for a way to freeze the rendering engine so that he can walk around and see what the engine was seeing from the spot where he was when he froze it. This is pretty useful to see, in the wild, what Quake is drawing. 

I dunno, except that r_showtris is the closest and it prettymuch makes r_draworder obsolete too.

http://g.photos.cx/fitz0025-3a.jpg

http://g.photos.cx/fitz0024-38.jpg

(tuhnu2.bsp by Zaka, recommended for duel) 

Tyrquake has r_lockfrustum and r_lockpvs IIRC. 

155.207.113.227 

MAN


IN


SPPPAAAACCCEEEE 

Now how did someone manage to have a 127.x.x.x (localhost) IP logged for that post? 

Anonymizer?