Botclip Q *ANSWERED*

[Pat Howard]

Quick question on bots and clipping:

I read once that you should simplify patches by covering them with bot clip. First, is this true? Second, does it go for all patches, even things like doorway arches, or just for the patches bots can "step" on.

Thanks,
-pat

[AEon]

In my experience it goes for all "rounded" patches, and I normally cover all of them. With simple patch meshes you would probably not need to cover them.

Come to think of it, it only makes sense to cover solid patches, i.e. non-solid "vine" simple patch meshes should be ignored by AAS anyway (AFAICT).

I am also usually more aggressive (simplifying the parts of the map that can be navigated) using playerclip instead of botclip. But that does depend on the context.

[obsidian]

Yes it's true. Use botclip on everything that you don't want the bots to interact with (details, alcoves, etc) and/or lower the surface counts for (patches etc.).

[Pat Howard]

Cool, thanks!

[AEon]

Some practical examples from AEdm7:

• The whole rock face in the RL2 arena is covered in floor to ceiling with mostly rectangular playerclip, and I have only just as little rock "bulging out" as possible to keep player movement near those rocks plausible. The rest of the rock sticking out I covered with large botclip brushes.
• All rounded off corners (patches) are player or botclipped.
• Since all my crates are ASE models, I had to manually playerclip and weapclip them. But since these crates (i.e. in corners) are of no use to bots I placed a botclip brush right above the playerclip, up to the ceiling, "denying" the bots access to the top of the crates. Same for barrels. In areas where the bot can actually reach the top of the crates this is not done, e.g. in the RL1 arena.
• All the open angled ceilings are either directly playerclipped or botclipped.
• Cuts into floors, e.g. where plants "broke" through the floor, are playerclipped, to even out the floor geometry.
• I don't have those in the map, but doorway arcs that protrude into the room, should also be botclipped, from the upper door frame right to the ceiling, to *not* create surfaces that the bots could possibly walk on. cityy will want to cover all the door arcs (patches) in his template texture map with botclip at some point.
• Complicated tree models should be abstracted e.g. by using a 8-sided clip brush representing the main trunk, forgetting about the branches etc.

General rules:

• Place clip on the largest grid possible.
• Use as few rectangular brushes as possible.
• Avoid complicated angles clip brush faces.
• Avoid overlapping clip brushes.

So basically you are creating a clip hull (a caulk hull you should already have) that simplifies the map as much as possible for bot / player navigation.

[monaster]

[*] Avoid overlapping clip brushes.[/list]

Is this also true for overlapping different clip brushes (like hint and weaponclip or whatever)? Any experience with that?

[ShadoW_86]

[*] Avoid overlapping clip brushes.[/list]

Is this also true for overlapping different clip brushes (like hint and weaponclip or whatever)? Any experience with that?

Why is that exactly?

[AEon]

Avoid overlapping clip brushes.

Is this also true for overlapping different clip brushes (like hint and weaponclip or whatever)? Any experience with that?

Note... I usually do these things by instinct, meaning at some point someone must have had good reason not to overlap, alas I then forgot the reason, but keep on doing it. On clips overlapping:

• 1st... it is neater in the editor, any clips that overlap create additional "lines" in the 2D views, needlessly confusing the top/down etc. views.
• 2nd... not sure about this but when you compile the map with -v (verbose) mode, overlap e.g. of player and weapon clip sharing faces, is shown (this was bspc.exe, IIRC) as a warning. Might be confusing this with normal brushes.
• 3nd... any overlap needs to be sorted out by the compiler... today, not really relevant, but I like saving resources.

About different clip brushes... frankly no idea... I try to avoid it with botclip vs. clip (playerclip)... but often it cannot be avoided. Since the best clipping is axial *and* with as few brushes as possible, there are some (theoretical) optimization conflicts.

Also with hint brushes: I try to use them very deterministically, e.g. I place one hint brush face (the other faces are skip / hintskip) along the critical line of sight, and that usually cuts though most of the map (depending on your layout obviously)... so I *have* to cut through clip brushes. Probably not ideal, but no way around it for me.

[dONKEY]

Interesting....I think I often overlap clip brushes, and clips of different types as well.

[obsidian]

I don't think there are any issues other than it being redundant.

Playerclip clips both players and bots.

Botclip clips just bots.

Weapon clip is just like playerclip except it adds metal sounds when walked on.

Hint isn't a clip and its use and function is completely different.

So overlapping is redundant since you never need to tell the compiler that a volume is to be clipped for both players and bots since it is implicit by player clip.

[Silicone_Milk]

I thought weapon clip only clips projectiles and metal clip is the playerclip w/ metal sound?

[AEon]

I was thinking what Silicone_Milk said.

And only very recently did I notice that weapclip actually does function as clip (playerclip), good reminder obsidian.

But you still might want to overlap them... e.g. you have ASE model crates and want them to show proper bullet decals when shot at, but the crates are near a wall you don't want the player to get close to at all... so you'd weapclip the boxes, then clip all the boxes and the rest of the wall area floor to ceiling.

(Reminds me I have been needlessly overlapping several weapclip with clip (need to delete the clip).)

Another typical overlap would be a rock corner, were you'd cut a clip with a 45° angle, but then cover everything with an axial botclip brush, because you don't care for that precision for the bots.

[sock]

As far as I am aware you can overlap clip brushes as much as you like, they are subtracted and merged by the compiler into a seperate mesh for the game engine. Making stuff neat and organized in the editor is a good habit to get into if you ever want to share your work with someone else. I usually start with the following:

1. weapon clip (fine detail,surfaces that should stop projectiles should work correctly)
2. player clip, over the top of weapon clip usually (smooth shapes so the player can move around easily)
3. bot clip (rough blocks so the AAS compiles, but lately I use fixaas instead)

I often use weapon clip if I need to manually clip an ASE model. Even thou weaponclip can act as player clip, they are seperate for a good reason. Fine details for bullets, big brushes for players.

[AEon]

sock,
your comment on starting with weapclip make sense, but made me wonder:

Does it make any sense to abstract the map's weapclip (hull) surfaces? In theory it should be far simpler and faster in real time for the engine to project bullet holes on a weapclip brush than e.g. trying to do so on a detailed torch.

Then again if the bullet decals precision is on a per pixel (HUD crosshair) level, sorting through the BSP tree or the weapclip hull should be pretty much the same?

[sock]

@AEon, I only weapon clip stuff that is made from ASE models (not using autoclip spawnflag function) or alpha surfaces. The engine will generate weaponclip from brush/patch surfaces, so there is no need to duplicate effort. I believe that weapon clip should always be as detailed as possible so that projectile collision behaves as the player expects.