Zogg Pak (Q4 mappack) Released!

[Johnny Law]

All right! Big ups, guys. Some quick impressions:

zoggdm1:

- The details are sweet. Especially the cables by the jumppads... I think someone else already mentioned that, so that's the sign of a good visual hook. But other stuff like the cracked glass and the flyer and the fallen panel too. Hangs together well.

- I appreciate that most of the risers/stairs sections are short enough to jump over.

- I didn't get to play this with Sabot because the bots would spawn and then just stand in one place. Don't know if this is an issue of the map not being tweaked for botplay, or just the "alpha"-ness of Sabot showing. The proportions of the space and structures feel good for fighting tho (probably small FFA). I'll see if I can get my net connection cooperating...



zoggdm2:

- Got a bit more commentary on this one, since Sabots seem comfy here and I was able to play.

- I dig the aesthetic. I can understand what people are saying about the flares being over the top; I think they may lean in that direction for me too, but not too much, and I do like the thematic mix you're aiming at. Any nicely arranged stonework creation does make me nostalgic for Q1 a bit (since I don't consider the Crazy Death Clown Gothic set of Q3 to fit the bill).

- The amount of stairs/ramp around the YA is a bit much, and I'm not crazy about the MH placement, but really if you twist my arm I would admit that I like the way this is put together for FFA. Your multilevel arrangement is cool; good job on making some interesting spaces around and through the Gothic archwork.

- Gameplay-wise it's a little retro in the size of the rooms and the amount of vertical separation, but I can roll with retro. (Actually the proportions could be appropriate for team DM, but I don't have even a fuzzy feeling yet of how team DM would work out here.)

- What's the "Z" in the tiles about?

- Like someone else, I noticed sparklies here and there, but then I've also seen a lot of sparklies in some official Q4CTF maps so I don't know if it's my video drivers or what.


Note to pjw: dudes have got several edge-touching visportal brush faces on these maps, including a four-brush doozy in zoggdm1. I don't know what to believe now man, my world is falling apart!

[QuakerX]

Thanks for the comments Johnny. We have played zoggdm1 with bots before. We know for a fact they don't like the glass, you may want to try again.

The Z stands for Zogg. Just a small decal we threw under the items.

What is your question about visportals?

Thanks again,

Quaker-X

[Johnny Law]

Aw, I was just referring to the other thread that I have bumping along around here at the moment.

iddevnet says that visportal faces sharing an edge is bad, and pjw also added that visportals touching in any way could make things go wrong, although you might get lucky and it wouldn't. I was intermittently complaining about how that made it a bit tough to do proper visblocking.

[QuakerX]

Hmm...interesting. Maybe that's a doom3 engine limitation. In COD you can do edge to edge visportals with no problem, and that is based off the Q3 engine

[hemostick]

Portals work radically different in D3 though.

[pjw]

I don't know what to believe now man, my world is falling apart!

Heh. I don't know what to tell you. All I know is that all the designers on Q4 were given the clear message that touching/overlapping/crossing visportals was asking for trouble. I guess trouble doesn't always come when you call? Just knowing that it's worked okay for people at times will probably make me a bit more adventurous and lead to more experimentation in future maps...

[KungFuSquirrel]

Portals that meet at the edges can work, but they don't always behave as you might like them to. In most cases, you'll want to avoid them. The real problem can be if you start using them like hints and doing crazy angles and crossing them over each other.

However, as with our phrase of "don't cross the portals," occasionally there can be successful use of edge-sharing portals to either make your map run or save the world from Zul. We recommend avoiding it, but if you feel comfortable with what you're doing or are under attack by a giant marshmallow, you can proceed at your own risk!

Just remember, in many cases fewer portals can actually be better, as it splits render batches into teeny tiny little groups o' triangles. We used to portal off every alcove, multiple times down hallways, etc., and it bit us in the ass when it came time to fix performance later.

[Johnny Law]

If I get total protonic reversal, I'm blaming you.

[wviperw]

Just remember, in many cases fewer portals can actually be better, as it splits render batches into teeny tiny little groups o' triangles. We used to portal off every alcove, multiple times down hallways, etc., and it bit us in the ass when it came time to fix performance later.

Can you explain this in more detail? I've seen this mentioned several times but haven't really found a good explanation for it. For one thing, "render batches" is foreign to me. (sorry to hijack thread).

[Black_Dog]

A render batch or draw is one call by Doom to OpenGL saying basically "render this stuff". Rendering calls involve CPU work and so keeping the number of draws low is important for performance.

The doom 3 compiler will try and lump things together into surfaces at compile time, but it has to split things at portals so that portals can ditch what's occluded easily. Obviously if the cost of issuing rendering calls for the extra batches introduced by portal splits exceeds the cost of rendering the stuff behind those portals, you have a problem.

That said, there isn't much that you can do to affect batch sizes (that I know of) since that's handled by the compiler. Model geometry will be batched by the engine, but converting level geometry to a model is enough of a pain in the ass that it's not worth the effort. Maybe being able to group things in the editor for the compiler to batch would be useful.

[KungFuSquirrel]

I was working on trying to do a simple description, but I failed miserably... so instead I'll just point everyone to the nice writeup Lunaran put together for us here: http://iddevnet.com/quake4/LevelEditor_Performance , in particular the "Draws & Batch Size" section... does a good job of explaining how the batches and draw calls are set up and the many ways to optimize them.

Just keep in mind, I've already seen people go overboard on this already saying "oh, I'll use like 4 textures," or "you need to use way fewer textures there!" or even inlining every model found in the level (this is not a good idea, by the way) - that's really not necessary. You can still use plenty of texture variety, interesting lighting, good portaling, modeled geometry, etc. It's just another aspect you need to keep in mind in addition to the performance considerations of the past, but one that can cause severe issues if you're not conscious of it as you're building your map.

Woooooo hijack!

[wattro]

maybe I am being silly, but how come zogg temple and zogg city have different skies?

i also agree with the light flares on zogg temple being too much and needing to be toned down

other than that, the work is fantastic!!!

[Johnny Law]

maybe I am being silly, but how come zogg temple and zogg city have different skies?

I hear that the Zogg empire is quite extensive.

[Black_Dog]

Geometry is batched per texture, per light? :icon28: Wow, that explains why the draws are so damn high.