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Mapping Help
This is the place to ask about mapping problems, techniques, and bug fixing, and pretty much anything else you want to do in the level editor.

For questions about coding, check out the Coding Help thread: https://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60097
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Sorry 
problem fixed.

It was a fucking clip brush that I had accidentally tied to an entity. Thank god for being able to export only visible and visgroups, eh? 
The Keyword 
was no valid brushes (or in this case their textures) ... 
 
It should be possible for qbsp to create doors out of clip brushes. However, due to an engine bug they wouldn't actually work :) 
Clip Doors 
do work if they include at least one brush (face?) with a visible texture. i made such a door by accident in sm108. 
Neglke 
yes, but even then, there's an engine bug where the physics bounding box of the door will only include the visible brushes. So to make it work reliably, you can't have any clip brushes sticking out past the bounding box of the combined visible brushes. 
Question (mainly For Aguire) 
So I was mapping away and hit ctrl+s to save my map. However, instead of hitting it once, I hit it twice by accident and WC crashed (presumably whilst saving the map). I was a bit worried, but the map seemed to have saved fine and loaded up ok. The filesize wasn't weird either, so I assumed all was ok.

I continue mapping...

...hours pass...

...then I try to compile my map. It works, but I get a warning about a brush with 0 faces. It tells me the texture used on the brush, so I assume this is 0 faces after plane conversion. The error pops up twice more, once for each hull.

I did notice later whilst mapping that some unimportant brushes had vanished from my map when I reloaded it. Presumably, one of these brushes was half saved or something. Perhaps it's just a dodgy brush I managed to create with the clipper - but this normally crashes qbsp, so perhaps not.

Anyway, the question: How the fuck do I find and eliminate this brush? I could copy all the changes from the new version of my map into an older version, which would probably eliminate the warning, but it seems like lots of hassle for nothing. I won't convert to .map and find it in radiant, because I need the .rmf file for visgroup info as the map is very big and impossible to work with without them.

Can I find the coordinates of this brush with qbsp at all? The only info I got was that it was a brush with no faces and that it was using the texture hstn0. There are a lot of other brushes using that texture, and I can't find it using a text editor because I don't know exactly what I'm looking for and the .map file is huge.

Currently it is not a major problem (I hope), but if you, the A-team, or anyone else can help me, please reply. 
Than 
Holy crap, 8000 brushes in 1 Q1 map file? Haven't you run into map size/face/etc limits by now? How long does the beast take to fullvis? Also, screenshots plz. 
Sorted! 
I pwn! Of course, I should probably have tried harder to fix it before posting the above message.

For other people having problems with Rogue brushes, esp. those using Worldcraft, here are some tips:

1. Check to see if there is a brush with centre on the origin - in Worldcraft there should be a cross handle if there is. This could be the culprit.

2. In WC it is entirely possible to create invalid brushes if you don't know what you are doing, and often when you do. The worst kind are thin slivers created by cutting along a plane of a brush using the clipper. Try to be careful not to do this, because the slivers will crash bsp and can be hard to track down.

3. If you can't find a problem then try exporting only visible stuff to a map file and compiling. At first hide large chunks of the level. Once the problem dissapears, you know roughly which area the problem is in. Gradually export less and less visible brushes until you get something manageable containing the error - maybe a few hundred brushes at the most. This is easy to look through in the editor, and can also be checked with notepad without problems. 
Jago 
Tyrann has more in his map :)

I will probably be adding another 3000-4000 brushes. Hopefully it won't fuck up. The only thing I have to watch out for is the lightmap size and model precache problems. I want this to run on fitzquake, so don't want to exceed any limits like that.

The level isn't THAT big. It isn't small by any means, and packs a lot of gameplay into it, but it's no Marcher Fortress. It's not in a large style either, so no massive areas filled with 3478327 monsters and a quad - I wanted to make something a little simpler and small scale. I'm kind of regretting it now, but I think that I can still make it fun without changing what I have much.

If I can be bothered to make the planned follow up maps, then they will be on a larger scale (as with most current big maps).

It takes about 15-20 minutes to fully compile (light extra, not extra 4) I think. I have a pentium-m 2ghz 512mb system. When it is finally released, you will see that it isn't particularly spectacular scale wise, and that is probably why it doesn't take a long time to compile. That and perhaps my brushwork is decent. I dunno.

There are some old shots on my website http://than.leveldesign.org/ Maybe you can see from the screens that it has a fairly detailed look? There are lots of areas, and the detail level is fairly consistent. r_speeds don't really top 1000, but they are probably higher than usual. 
Tyrann's Skip Util Causing Lighting Problems 
I've been using this for a while to remove faces in my current map, and up until now I hadn't had any problems with it. However, recently I have started seeing blotchy, horrible lighting on a couple of walls in my map. Here is a shot of what I am talking about: http://than.leveldesign.org/files/blotchyblotchy.jpg

I am certain skip caused this, because I disabled skip and the error was not present - all the lighting was fine.

Does anyone know why this happens and how it can be fixed. I run skip last of all, so perhaps I should try running light afterwards instead.

If nothing can fix this, it would be nice if there was a -removesurf <texname> switch in Aquire or Tyrann's versions of light ;) ;) ;)

p.s. the dodgy lighting occurs in areas at the boundaries of the level for some reason. 
Skip 
Well, Tyrann had said it had some bugs (and that he wasn't using it cause of that?), I never ran into any myself... I guess it probably has higher chances of happening on large levels. 
Duh 
fixed again.

yes, lighting after skip removal works. 
Than 
I don't know how skip works, but you could try running vis after skip. If the vis data set is large (>1MB, e.g. when fastvis), skip might have capacity problems. 
Errr .. Skip ??? 
What is skip
Mmmm... 
JPL 
There are probably numerous references to skip in this very thread, but I'll explain it again, since I'm in a good mood. In fact, since I'm such a nice guy, I've uploaded it to my site here: http://than.leveldesign.org/files/remove_skip.zip (26kb)

The skip removal tool is a small utility made a long time ago by Tyrann. It was never officially released, and I recall him saying he lost the source code to it. As it works fine as it is, I guess he never bothered to write it again and update it.

Anyway, the skip tool removes all surfaces from the visible hull of a BSP. The original intention of this was to remove surfaces that could not be seen by the player, such as those in high up places above where the player can reach, on the unseen sides of doors etc. This is probably still the main use. However, this also allows for a few cool tricks (creating invisible doors for one), that you can find out about by reading the previous posts in this thread. 
Er... 
I just noticed I made a rather large mistake in my explanation:

Anyway, the skip tool removes all surfaces from the visible hull of a BSP.

Should be:

Anyway, the skip tool removes all surfaces using a texture named "skip" from the visible hull of a BSP
# Of Brushes 
i have found that at about 10000 brushes, you start to run out of clipnodes, no matter how much you clip brushwork, just because the amount of areas that are present take up so many of the clipnodes.

careful! 
Than 
I had exactly the same type of lighting artifacts in the secret map of Contract, towards the end of its construction:

http://kell.leveldesign.org/screenshots/contract-blotchy.jpg

I was using Tyrann's lighting util by then, but to make use of entity compression for the secret map, not skip. I don't think skip was even in the version I was using.

Maybe it's just a knave thing o_o 
Thanks For The Tips, Necros 
I have tons of arches that can be clipped, so if I run out, I will try clipping them. There's also not much rock in the level (there is a bit, but not like something like februus or czg07) so perhaps I'll be ok.

Anyway, as I said, the lighting glitch was fixed by using skip before light. I will try it before vis next time and see what happens.

Wtf is entity compression? 
Entity Compression 
Wtf is entity compression?

It's not really compression, but it reduces the amount of entity text present in the compiled bsp by removing key/value pairs from the light entities which are not needed after the lighting stage. 
Than 
Thanks a lot for all these cool informations ! You are really a nice guy ;) 
JPL�s Opinion Seconded 
 
Also 
WC - try the most basic tool included - "check for problems" You�ve probably already done this, but if not; with Q1 it seems to be alot more finnicky and can find illegal entities, though with visgroups yor best bet is removing all before you try deleting a single part of one group - buggy behaviour (WC 1.6a) tends to seemingly randomly hide / delete depending on the order you originally did stuff in . . . 20 versions ago

either way - looking forward to the release 
A Long Shot... 
I'm sure everyone who knows the answer will tell me this map is basically doomed, but I'm trying to figure out a reason for this weird occurence. DuBSP is reporting that my map has leaks. What's unusual about it is that: 1) it only reports the leak while filling, but not while generating hulls. 2) it refuses to generate a pointfile, even when using -oldleak. I'm in the process of isolating parts of the map and compiling them individually but, maddeningly so, it always seems to be a different entity reached while filling.

For anyone feeling curious/helpful, here's the compiler dump.

DUBSP Disunion Level Compiler by Eric 'Riot' Lasota
Based on TreeQBSP v1.62 by Greg Lewis.

Input file: manatees.map
Output file: manatees.bsp

---- LoadMapFile ----
*** WARNING 06: No info_player_deathmatch entities in level
2439 faces
410 brushes
35 entities
50 unique texnames
627 texinfo
Processing hull 0...
---- Brush_LoadEntity ----
383 brushes
---- CSGFaces ----
2277 brushfaces
3088 csgfaces
1580 mergedfaces
---- SolidBSP ----
2052 split nodes
832 solid leafs
1221 empty leafs
0 water leafs
3329 leaffaces
3096 nodefaces
---- Portalize ----
1221 vis leafs
3309 vis portals
---- FillOutside ----
*** WARNING 10: Reached occupant at (-112 352 88), no filling performed.
---- MakeFaceEdges ----
---- GrowRegions ----
Processing hull 1...
Processing hull 2...
Processing hull 3...
---- WriteBSPFile ----
490 planes 9800
3533 vertexes 42396
2130 nodes 51120
627 texinfo 25080
3226 faces 64520
1701 clipnodes 13608
1294 leafs 36232
3467 marksurfaces 6934
12835 surfedges 51340
7955 edges 31820
50 textures 451444
lightdata 0
visdata 0
entdata 3037

2.359 seconds elapsed
Bytes used: 4108697


thanks for looking. 
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