filtering hints which have skip on them.. &hint questions

[skinmaster]

a fully hint textured brush gets filtered but a hint/skip brush does not...
is this due to the hint surfaceparm in "hint" and if so, will adding that to the skip shader break skip?

// ydnar: skip works like quake 2 hint: it doesn't generate bsp splits
// use on sides of hint brushes where you don't want bsp splits or portals

does the above mean that a skip face coinciding with a hint face will nullify the hint face?

Obsidian will probably be able to help me with some filler info I've been trying to better understand the brushwork for hitting hints in open space area division...

IE, i have a large open area and am dividing it into 'hint rooms" so that pvs will calculate the vis areas from something like 52 cubic areas within one "outside room"

heres a pic:


afaik the skip tells the pvs not to split its volumed space/region?

if thus is true, how does the compiler handle hitting hint on one face of the skip region?
when some shaders are mixed on a brush they sometimes cause a shadered solid to go nonsolid...

but what about a fully hint textured brush... what does it do differently than the skip/hint combo?

im wondering because although the hinting is pretty tight already, the drawn spaces are minimal from almost every perspective, this editor filtering of hints irks me... makes me feel like i'm missing something thor..

and what about them top sky facing faces........should they get hint or skip?

[obsidian]

Code: Select all

// Obsidian: same as skip but name changed to allow CTRL+H to filter both hint and skip
textures/common/hintskip
{
	qer_nocarve
	qer_trans 0.30
	qer_editorImage textures/common/skip.tga
	surfaceparm nodraw
	surfaceparm nonsolid
	surfaceparm structural
	surfaceparm trans
	surfaceparm noimpact
	surfaceparm skip
}

If you have an open area where you can see from any one point of area straight through to the other side, placing hint/skip in it won't do anything but make things worse. I suggest you run around some stock maps with /r_showtris 1 on and observe how geometry appears and are removed based on your location and PVS. An area without walls simply can't have geometry changes like that.

[skinmaster]

this technique lets the room subdivide when you are facing an open door from outside it, my issue is that the outside area has many ins and outs and defining what gets drawn outside from all of those -near the door corridors as a player turns the corner... instead of drawing the whole room all suddenly, it draws pieces..


for example, if the entire outside area were to be counted as a single room, it would not matter where in it you stood, anything the room could see, would be drawn.

No i complexify pvs quite a bit with the things i do, and the only way i could cordone off the drawable triangles was with this style of hinting.


let me see if i can show you...

[lvlshot]http://rave.ca/en/image/original/441145/[/lvlshot]

in the editor the brushwork is all flush and neat along specific structural brush cuts

the structural stuff changes heights throughout the big area room and has tunnels beneath it so i had no way to run diagonals, i will include the map file with the release as usual so that how things are done can be checked out by anyone interested

ps thanks for the hintskip tip

[skinmaster]

edit

[skinmaster]

so yeah, um, my hinting techniques work pretty good, heres a shot to show you the draw of the shotgun area from the flag room, perfect pvs-ing

[lvlshot]http://www.rave.ca/en/image/original/441432/[/lvlshot]