Unna Oertdottir on 27/8/2019 at 20:11
Max AI path cells is 131070 (from 65534 in OldDark). I doubt anyone will ever hit this limit. A huge 2000x2000 DU mission might have it. Some other limits will be hit earlier.
uncadonego on 27/8/2019 at 21:51
Do you have any suspicions about why the pathfinding works without the Show Hot trick after making these changes? That was just the first thing that I thought might be the reason. It would be nice to know what fixed it, just for future builds......
Unna Oertdottir on 27/8/2019 at 22:27
Big missions have big issues. Compiling pathfinding can stop because of many reasons-
A room brush inside a room brush inside a room brush inside a room brush will cause a lot of trouble.
Or many Apparent cell cycle in portal_traverse_scene errors (light issues).
Always watch the monolog for warnings and errors and try to fix it.
How many pathfinding cells do you have? It will be displayed in monolog after pathfinding.
uncadonego on 28/8/2019 at 06:42
In the changes I've recently made, I did delete 2 torches and move two, and I also had to lower many ceiling lights since eliminating the crown moulding airbrushes on the ceilings. Perhaps that may have fixed a light issue? Hard to say at this point, since I only checked pathfinding out of curiousity just last night.
Unna Oertdottir on 28/8/2019 at 06:55
Light in tiny narrow spaces is always prone to errors, that's another reason why light radius is very important. You want to control the light.
It doesn't hurt to run pathfinding now and then and watch the monolog.
uncadonego on 7/9/2019 at 09:25
Quote Posted by marbleman
But the real cell saver is the time value. I recently reclaimed about 1000 cells but "to end"-ing just eight narrow but tall brushes. The general rule here, as far as I can tell, is that you want your biggest brushes to have the lowest values and the smallest one to have the highest values.
Just for the heck of it, I experimented by doing the opposite. I saved first, but experimented just to see what would happen. I saved a lot of cells earlier by making big airbrushes earliest in the time sequence. In this experiment, I took
one large tall fill solid brush and moved it to 1 in sequence. On optimizing, the cell count had increased by 2,638 cells!
uncadonego on 7/9/2019 at 09:34
One thing though, taking this OldDark mission and trying to "retro-fit" it for NewDark shows me a lot of weaknesses of the OldDark.
For one example, moving forward with the camera in 3d window, I travel through one "section" of air to the distant background...just a facade. I proceed through into solid, then when air shows up again, I immediately stop and turn the camera to look around. I see a building that, had I started in NewDark, the polycount increase would easily have been able to handle showing the actual building in the distant background.
Not only would it look more realistic and less claustrophobic, but it would have given a better sense of orientation in-game for the player.
I sort of lament that I'm doing a patch job here.
At any rate I've worked sufficient changes to get cell count down to 20,038 so far. At least I have a decent chunk of building potential now.
Yandros, thank you so much for your simple but versatile res_cube. What a useful thing it has been.
uncadonego on 11/9/2019 at 02:21
Taking out air cylinders where I run into them in arches and replacing them with solid wedges, bringing down cell count.
Am I kind of stuck with air brushes where I've made intersecting arches though? Filling solid would be wonky solid where they intersected at the "t" spot.
I don't want to waste a lot of time in the sewers for nothing, maybe someone has already experimented with this in the past. If I put cube fill air "nodes" where the arches intersect so that fill solid wedges still work, will I end up with a net change in cell count? If it wouldn't save cells, I wouldn't even bother.
BTW I've got the cell count down from crash to 19,330 so far.
DirkBogan on 11/9/2019 at 02:31
It depends on what kind of arches you mean, but check out
Sound of A Burrick In A Room -- skacky made all kinds of intersecting arches using corner-apex pyramids and/or wedge brushes
e.g.
Inline Image:
https://i.imgur.com/9Z24u6d.jpgIt doesn't come across well in images, so I recommend checking them out yourself in DromEd.
uncadonego on 11/9/2019 at 07:58
Quote Posted by DirkBogan
It depends on what kind of arches you mean, but check out
Sound of A Burrick In A Room -- skacky made all kinds of intersecting arches using corner-apex pyramids and/or wedge brushes
It doesn't come across well in images, so I recommend checking them out yourself in DromEd.
Don't have TDP installed, but I get it from the image. Thanks DB....
