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 

It looks like the WVis times are rounded to the nearest minute?

This was on a Core2Duo E6850 (3 GHz).

Original VIS run:

---- Vis 2.31 ---- Modified by Bengt Jardrup

File: c:\quake\id1\maps\wish16.bsp
2929 portalleafs
8356 numportals
State file out of date, will be overwritten
testlevel = 4
ambient sky disabled

average leafs visible: 192
max leafs visible: 646 near (-608 352 592)
c_chains: 39836161
visdatasize: 219 kb compressed from 1049 kb

Elapsed time : 6:52

WVis run:

---- WVis 2.31 ----
Modified by Bengt Jardrup
Multithreading enabled by Willem

File: c:\quake\id1\maps\wish16.bsp
2929 portalleafs
8356 numportals
State file out of date, will be overwritten
testlevel = 4
ambient sky disabled

Using 2 threads.


average leafs visible: 192
max leafs visible: 646 near (-608 352 592)
c_chains: 39880904
visdatasize: 219 kb compressed from 1049 kb

Elapsed time : 3:00

I just did this, so I haven't actually looked at the map in the game. If I see any problems I'll post them.

The only difference in the log is the c_chains (no idea if that's important). I ran the full BSP, Light, Vis each time with no change to the actual .map file 

I guess this is the recursive linkage made in between volumes. As in bsp process there's a volume expansion process that defines where are each faces / leafs, I think it is almost the same for vis process except the tools creates a chained list of volume in order to process them recursively (i.e from this volume, process the faces, and check what are the others visible volume not in the list, etc...) and determine which volumes (and then number of faces to render per volume) are visible from a given position.
This is how I understood the system in very "rough" way.. and maybe I'm wrong :P 

Yeah, I'll check the rounding but I didn't really change anything there that I can think of. Hmm... 

Progress in Quake map building, after all these years ! Nice work !

Quick question about something else:

Does it really make a lot of difference if you make your curves just by cutting them with a circle, or if you use the vector manipulation to make them more or less the same size and triangles ? If anyone has some more info (on the web, maybe ?) about vector manipulation, please let me know. 

http://www.quaketerminus.com/hosted/happymaps/curv_tut.htm

Learn those ratios by heart, use them. The ratio used in the above tut is 0:2 2:4 4:2 2:0 if that makes any sense. There are other possible workable ratios but that one's always worked for me.

As far as constructing said curves, the 2-point clipper will probably give you less headache (and fewer invalid brushes) than trying to vertex manip everything into place. 

I remember someone else having a problem awhile back with this ... I have some spots in my level where creatures turn black despite the floor and the walls around them being lit perfectly fine. Is there an easy workaround for this? I'm running FitzQuake... 

If they're passing over a sky brush then they'll always appear black unless the sky brush has a normal, solid brush inside it.

If they're appearing black when passing over normal lit floor then there's an issue with the origin of the monster.

They take no reference from the walls. 

But what can I do as a mapper? Just rework the brushes in the area until the engine stops having an issue? 

Maybe it's a known issue.