Quark map size and lighting
by Mark Miley · in Artist Corner · 10/23/2003 (11:31 pm) · 17 replies
I have been messing with the engine now for a couple weeks. I've learned quite a bit browsing the forums, but I need some clarification on some aspects of creation.
When making maps/interiors I noticed that it seems rather limited in the size of the maps that can be made. I've read allot of posts on the matter, but i'm still unsure. Most of my areas for my game will be interior or atleast having many structural elements. Do I have to make them in sections in quark/WC and then put them back together in torque? Or is there something i'm missing? It seems like everything was designed for large sprawling landscapes and not large detailed maps like that in half life or unreal.
I have been playing with quark and have not found the definitive answer on this either. Can I see the lights I've put down in quark in either the 3d of opengl window or does that recquire guess work in quark? I've put down lights and they seem to work once exported and brought to torque, but it is a bit frustrating not being able to see them while working with the map directly.
edit: Also I suddenly find my game keeps crashing everytime I try to add an interior. I have tried adding to my missions and to one of the defaults and when I click on any of the interiors to add it to the mission everything crashes.
I want to say that I have found answers to most of my problems so far on these forums and that I am in debt to those who have asked the questions before me. I was going pretty strong in the first week, but I have found myself rather flustered the last couple of days with this engine.
When making maps/interiors I noticed that it seems rather limited in the size of the maps that can be made. I've read allot of posts on the matter, but i'm still unsure. Most of my areas for my game will be interior or atleast having many structural elements. Do I have to make them in sections in quark/WC and then put them back together in torque? Or is there something i'm missing? It seems like everything was designed for large sprawling landscapes and not large detailed maps like that in half life or unreal.
I have been playing with quark and have not found the definitive answer on this either. Can I see the lights I've put down in quark in either the 3d of opengl window or does that recquire guess work in quark? I've put down lights and they seem to work once exported and brought to torque, but it is a bit frustrating not being able to see them while working with the map directly.
edit: Also I suddenly find my game keeps crashing everytime I try to add an interior. I have tried adding to my missions and to one of the defaults and when I click on any of the interiors to add it to the mission everything crashes.
I want to say that I have found answers to most of my problems so far on these forums and that I am in debt to those who have asked the questions before me. I was going pretty strong in the first week, but I have found myself rather flustered the last couple of days with this engine.
About the author
#2
10/24/2003 (5:29 pm)
Thanks for the advice. I fixed the crashing issue. I'm not sure exactly what it was, but I had a previous build that imported the maps just fine. In quark I noticed that when I zoom back there is a blue grid box and if my map is bigger than that area the map crashes on export. Is that due to the light map size issue? I'm going to test to see if I can have elements outside of the blue box but not bigger than the blue box and see if it will export. Thanks again for the advice. Building the whole map in quark and then exporting the segments sounds like a good idea as one of my concerns was keep the scaling right for the different sections.
#3
Granted, it's not as good--but it's there!
10/24/2003 (6:16 pm)
Alex, Desmond Fletcher submitted a resource so QuArK would render the point lights in the openGL window. :-)Granted, it's not as good--but it's there!
#4
Desmond put that resource in a post from what I remember and last I checked it wasn't availible for download. The light were very dim so it barely looked like it would in the engine.
Matt
10/24/2003 (6:46 pm)
You can bust your maps up into groups and hide the groups from the exporter by clicking the folder name and using "Hide from exporter". Then just export the peice you need. once you get into TGE just use "Drop at origin" amd load all your peices into the world editor and make them a sim group for easy selection.Desmond put that resource in a post from what I remember and last I checked it wasn't availible for download. The light were very dim so it barely looked like it would in the engine.
Matt
#5
As to complexity, I've built interiors with up to 32,000 surfaces; that seems to be the current limitation. Past this you need to export your interior in pieces as others above have suggested. If your interiors are this large, you may want to break them up anyway just to take advantage of the LOD system.
And last, as Eric says, there IS a way to preview your lighting in QuArK. However, this is not pertinent when you use the radiosity form of lighting.
@Matthew, what resource were you referring to that's not available?
10/24/2003 (7:03 pm)
@Mark, the major axes (blue) are a hold-over from Q2 and HL days when maps could not be larger than 8192 units. Map2dif does not have this limitation but you have obviously hit the lightmap issue. You either need to break up large (long) brushes into smaller pieces or increase the light_geometry_scale (use powers of two). As to complexity, I've built interiors with up to 32,000 surfaces; that seems to be the current limitation. Past this you need to export your interior in pieces as others above have suggested. If your interiors are this large, you may want to break them up anyway just to take advantage of the LOD system.
And last, as Eric says, there IS a way to preview your lighting in QuArK. However, this is not pertinent when you use the radiosity form of lighting.
@Matthew, what resource were you referring to that's not available?
#6
10/24/2003 (7:38 pm)
I can't seem to find it now but it was a post about veiwing your lights in gl window in Quark. You wrote a Quark config File (Or whatever there called) for real time lighting in quark but last time I tried to download it I got bad link. Maybe you have it somewhere else or maybe it was just down. The post was from like a year ago and between yours and my profile its to many to posts to search. I dont know if you ever made it a resource or not.
#9
I figured out the ignore to build so I can output sections but build the whole map in one file. That's cool and is gonna save some much needed time.
About the light maps. Now I read that the light map scale and geometry scale need to be the same number to get accurate results. Now if I increase this scale will I be able to get bigger maps? That will allow for bigger shadow maps from what I understand. Is there a cap on that? Like you can only go so high before map2dif or torqure will flip out? Could I go as high as 1024x1024 and have a huge map? What performance hit would that be? Sorry for all the questions, but I figured I would ask while I was thinking about it.
Now I have one final question. I am doing a side scrolling adventure and was wondering how you might setup up the maps for that. Obviously the camera needs room for it to be away from the player so what i've been doing is leaving one wall open that looks in at the player and moves with him. Now it seems doing it that way I wouldn't be able to use portals at all as I would never have a leak free environment. Is that unwise...is there a better way to do that?
Thanks again for all the help everyone. The community here is simply amazing in it's ability and the speed at which they answer posts. :)
~mark
10/25/2003 (10:59 pm)
Thanks everyone for the advice. I got the lighting to work great in quark. About the radiosity. I added that to quark and it looks and works awesome, but is that free to use on a commercial product? I noticed that is using fsrad and I looked a little into that, but i'm not sure if there is any license issues with that code. I figured out the ignore to build so I can output sections but build the whole map in one file. That's cool and is gonna save some much needed time.
About the light maps. Now I read that the light map scale and geometry scale need to be the same number to get accurate results. Now if I increase this scale will I be able to get bigger maps? That will allow for bigger shadow maps from what I understand. Is there a cap on that? Like you can only go so high before map2dif or torqure will flip out? Could I go as high as 1024x1024 and have a huge map? What performance hit would that be? Sorry for all the questions, but I figured I would ask while I was thinking about it.
Now I have one final question. I am doing a side scrolling adventure and was wondering how you might setup up the maps for that. Obviously the camera needs room for it to be away from the player so what i've been doing is leaving one wall open that looks in at the player and moves with him. Now it seems doing it that way I wouldn't be able to use portals at all as I would never have a leak free environment. Is that unwise...is there a better way to do that?
Thanks again for all the help everyone. The community here is simply amazing in it's ability and the speed at which they answer posts. :)
~mark
#10
10/25/2003 (11:31 pm)
@Mark: FSRad and TGERad code is 100% free to use on commercial products... any improvements being rolled back into the community is helpful, but not necessary.
#11
10/26/2003 (2:55 pm)
Thanks...just what I wanted to here. I will certainly give back to the community if I can figure out what I'm doing. :)
#12
10/27/2003 (10:18 am)
Guys, don't know if you know this or not, but in the Mission Editor, in the Edit -> WorldEditor Settings menu, in the lower left quadrant of the pop up window that appears, you can set the move scale, rotate scale and scale scale to whatever you need for precise movements, or in other words, what a notch will be in the World Editor. I'm not a mapper, but I know this is really useful for precise placement :)
#13
holodeck.st.usm.edu/vrcomputing/vrc_t/tools/updates/quark_updates.zip
10/27/2003 (3:40 pm)
Sorry Mark, I inadvertently deleted the link--it'sback now:holodeck.st.usm.edu/vrcomputing/vrc_t/tools/updates/quark_updates.zip
#14
Nicolas: I'll check that out. Thanks.
10/31/2003 (6:18 am)
Thanks Desmond. I did the changes for the omni light manually, but haven't gotten around to changing the other light types. This will certainly save some much needs time for my project. Barely treading water as it is. :)Nicolas: I'll check that out. Thanks.
#15
10/31/2003 (1:07 pm)
Ah I had somehow missed that resource before. Good to know! Thanks Desmond.
#16
10/31/2003 (1:22 pm)
NP, Alex, maybe you can get some of that into the HEAD ;)
#17
Once the Quake3 tools get GPL'd, I will very likely make it a hobby project to get them spitting out dif format.
Quake3 shaders are very good looking, widely compatible, high performance, and have an established and documented art pipeline... There is some excellent code around for rendering Q3 BSP and shaders already... I am actually thinking of some source in specific... I should probably email the author to see if he'll release the code under the BSD/MIT license... it's GPL right now.
I would think Q3 will be GPL'd in 2004? Which is good cause I really don't have a graphics itch to scratch right now anyway...
-J
10/31/2003 (5:02 pm)
On a PVS, radiosity, general coolness note...Once the Quake3 tools get GPL'd, I will very likely make it a hobby project to get them spitting out dif format.
Quake3 shaders are very good looking, widely compatible, high performance, and have an established and documented art pipeline... There is some excellent code around for rendering Q3 BSP and shaders already... I am actually thinking of some source in specific... I should probably email the author to see if he'll release the code under the BSD/MIT license... it's GPL right now.
I would think Q3 will be GPL'd in 2004? Which is good cause I really don't have a graphics itch to scratch right now anyway...
-J
Torque Owner Alex Swanson
There isn't any reason why you couldn't make interiors of similar scale to those in Q3/UT in Torque, but I would make sure to make use of LOD and portals to keep your framrate good. It may help framrate to split these up into multiple pieces, but it is not necessary for them to function. An easy way to split them up and keep them aligned is to build the entire map in one Quark file, then split it into groups. Make one duplicate of the map for each group and go through deleting the other groups. Because they all have the same origin point, these pieces can be aligned perfectly in the mission editor by giving them the same location coordinates.
As for your crash: Are your textures in the interiors folder for your game? The most common crash on loading an interior is a missing texture (I can't remember what the error message for this is, but it causes a lot of confusion)