negke

Oh, well, the best solution long term would be to get a Windows version with multithreading working. I could run it for you, yes, but that's painful. :P

To be clear, this?

http://user.tninet.se/~xir870k/visbjp.zip 

 

somebody provided be a vis tool that is supposed to run 40% faster than Id's original one... but I never tested it as I did not trust the guy that much: anyone who wants to benchmark it can send me an email: I'll provide the stuf.... at your own risk :P 

... I also have the source... 

Can someone hook me up with a .PRT and a matching .BSP file so I can run some VIS debugging? 

...you can generate them yourself from the BSP. Use for example BspInfo (delivered with aguirRe's visbjp suite) and the -prt flag. 

Ha! So you can, awesome. Thanks! 

 

...but it comes with zero assurances of it actually working or not corrupting data. :P

I took some of my lunch hour today to see if this could be done quickly.

http://files.getdropbox.com/u/161473/Vis.zip

That should be a multi-threaded version of BJP VIS. When you run it, you'll see some additional text appear like:

"Using X threads."

The X will be however many cores/processors you have in your machine.

The percentage and progres stuff is all kinds of messed up and I don't have time to fix it today - lunch time is over! But I'll take a look at that in the future once the basics are nailed down.

Anyway, try it, run some side by side timings and let me know if I'm crazy or if this actually works.

The best way to see it work is to start up your Task Manager and look at the processor activity. All of your cores/processors should be pegged at 100% when this is running.

Thanks! 

swapping to your vis for all my vising needs. i'm seeing 100% cpu usage, so it appears to be working fine. i'll let you know if anything weird happens.

you are currently on my list of people made of awesomeness for this, btw. ^_^

damn, i wish i had a quad core though. :( 

The part that scares me is if the map will load into Quake when it's done. That's something I can't test here. :) Let me know, plz! 

Despite it may load, it also can generates HOMs and leaks.... wait and see :P 

I don't see why it shouldn't load into Quake. After all, all you changed was the resource management. The actual vis calculation and state file handling remains untouched.
I'm running a test at the moment. One hour of willemvis vs one hour of regular (single-threaded) vis. The time estimations would help here, but whatever. No idea if there's much of a gain. I don't have a real multicore machine, just one of those p4-hyperthreading dudes (I was always suspicious about this being a possible bottleneck). 

How many threads does it say you're using? If it's more than 1, you should see SOME improvement. 

I also renamed the EXE for easier use.

http://files.getdropbox.com/u/161473/WVis.zip

Give that a shot if you want the time estimates to be useful. 

 

So I guess now, whoever has the most cores/processors on their machine needs to become a VIS mule for the group. :P 

Yes, there's definitely some improvement (with 2 threads) - I'd say it's at least 40% faster. I was so dumb as to accidentally close the window just now, so I can't tell the exact difference, unfortunately. But still, your version is useful for running at night when there're no other programs running beside vis. Thanks for offerning your lunch break. 

offering the sacrificing 

well, i've been using it all day with fast vising. it is faster, but it's hard to tell just how much without doing a proper full vis.

i have a second map that's in the final stage so i'll do a couple of test runs of full -level 4 vising on it, one with and one without multithreading for a proper comparison, but assuming there isn't a fundamental difference in what vis is doing in -fast vs without -fast, i'd say it's creating .bsp files that are perfectly fine. :) 

how you managed to improve this blocking up tool, Willem!
If I count all vis time I made since I started mapping in '97 I could have learned C+ and have dived into it... too late I guess. 

"i'd say it's creating .bsp files that are perfectly fine. "

Sweet! i guess it's good to go then. 

link is 404? 

Sorry, the file moved. I've made it permanent here:

http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/tools/windows/misc/WVis.zip 

2 Core AMD works!!!
Test map 60 sec vis down to about 36 sec.

Base vis is crazy fast