Terrain preventing .aas creation?

[Amphetamine]

You get AI stutter because the entire map is being seen as a single cluster by the bots. Check out Cardigan's bot/clusterportal tutorial for some answers to that problem: http://cardigan.planetquake.gamespy.com ... otopt.html

Not heared of crashes being caused by huge clusterportals before though.

[Magnus]

Ok from what I have read it seems that that the use of clusterportal to prevent the stuttering in a terrain map is impractical if not impossible.

It seems that clusterportal won't work if it is crossed by a teleport path, jump path or launch path if it intersects any other brush and it must be surrounded by solid brushes on 4 sides and must be cut to have parallel sides. So getting clusterportal to work in a terrain where the majority of solid brushes are the uneven terrain its self would be near impossible.
You could place a load of botclip then place the clusterportals in windows cut into the botclip so they would have a path from one area to another, but it is going to realy mess things up when a bot is blasted back and into the air by rocket splash and seems to hit a wall.
Even if you didn't care about the bots seeming to hit a wall there is still the fact that most terrain maps are crossed by a lot of teleport, jump and launch paths wich is a problem that will prevent the clusterportals from working anyway.

Am I understanding this stuff right?

[Amphetamine]

It's not teleport paths, just that bspc will "see" directly through teleporters to the destination and consider that area to be in the same cluster.

Looking at your map from the top down view, I would just try to clusterportal accross the passes at the side. It shouldn't be too difficult to achieve unless you have jumppads going directly through that area or you have teleporters with destinations on the other team's side of the mountain range. It looks like you've got some additional brushwork around the mountain passes, if you can post a screenshot of what you have there, I'll see if I can sugest how to get your clusterportals built there.

[Magnus]

Ok here are some closer immages of that area.







As you can see the terrain floor is rounded and angled making it tough to properly place any clusterportal.

Here is a overhead shot of the map showing the location of various clips and paths.

The blue/red dots are teleporters on the blue/red side and the blue/red lines show what ones are connected.

The green dots are launch pads the orange dots are where the push_locations are and the yellow dots are where the launch pads will put you.

The areas shaded pink are fullclip and the areas shaded yellow are botdonotenter.

The launchpads marked 1 and 2 launch you over the line of hills in the middle of the map to grab a central powerup or wep. (Havent decided what one yet.)



Hope this helps to get an idea of what you need to know.

Thanks again for all the help.

[Kat]

What you could do is put manmade 'gate ways' at strategic places which are buried in the hills either side (the player has to pass through them), this'll create the needed 'flat surfaces' and allow you to do some hard botclipping around them without effecting the rest of the terrain too unduely. Otherwise, yah, that's going to be a real bugger to work with, you'll get floaty bots when you try and botclip the terrain level.

[Amphetamine]

Hrmmm... I wasn't counting on you having a jumppad path over the center of the mountain range, that really buggers things up for adding clusterportals I'm afraid..... I'm really not sure what to sugest now.

[dnky]

It would depend on where both parts of the entity are. You could place a portal just beyond the target, assuming the target ent is at the highest point of the jump.

[Magnus]

Yea I made this one more tough on myself than was needed.

I think I got it though.

Here is what I did with those passes at the ends of the central line of hills.





Then I framed the area up with botclip and then placed a clusterportal window in the middle. I then crossed the map with botclip to the top and left a nice window of clusterportal for the bots to pass through on the jump over the central hills.
The target_push for each of the jump pads are on their own respective side of the map so the jump path does not cross the bot clip or clusterportal.

The stutter seems to be gone and I can add up to 8 bots with very little hit to fps and the bots are using the map well. I am still getting the z_malloc crash, but not nearly as often.

[Silicone_Milk]

cool stuff Magnus. Glad to see it coming together =)

This makes me want to pick up Q3 mapping again!

[Amphetamine]

Nice to see you got it working in the end mate

In the looks department, I'd switch to Dotproduct2 as the terrain will look much nicer. At the moment your textures are repeating really noticably, which grates on the eyes somwhat.

[Magnus]

cool stuff Magnus. Glad to see it coming together =)

This makes me want to pick up Q3 mapping again!

Thanks man

Nice to see you got it working in the end mate

In the looks department, I'd switch to Dotproduct2 as the terrain will look much nicer. At the moment your textures are repeating really noticably, which grates on the eyes somwhat.

Yea I was thinking of going back and repainting my terrain after making the textures larger. Either way I need to do something with that.

Thanks for all the help.

[obsidian]

Keep the terrain as it is and make another map using dotproduct/alphaGen.