Quake3World

I have a bit of a dilemma. I've made a maze, and I've made it out of patches. It uses around 5000 patches. Now, Quake 3 has some kind of issue with patches where, in certain hardware configurations (as far as I know, not necessarily "bad" hardware - it can happen on stuff obviously capable of running Quake 3 properly, even on more ludicrous maps), the frame-rate drops drastically. I don't know what the frame-rates are, but I know that I can force my game to drop to <5 FPS under certain circumstances.

Now, that this is due to the patches is pretty obvious, and pretty easy to prove. I don't know of any way to get around this issue while still using patches, but I do know that Q3MAP2 generates individual brush faces for models with appropriate spawnflags. We also all know that this is incredibly buggy and imperfect, more often than not creating messes of invisible, yet still solid, faces all over the gaff. This usually happens with uneven or angled surfaces - 90 degree squares are pretty friendly with the system. With that said, however, they are invisible faces, and this maze does have 4,096 "cells" with up to 6 sides open, totaling ~25,000 potentially blocked passages. I can't test all these on my own, and I've yet to figure out how I managed to decompile a map with collision-ified models and have them show up as actual brushes in Radiant, so I can't do it a fast way either.

Basically, what I need is a way to create brush faces manually. It's possible, according to Q3MAP2, but Radiant doesn't agree with such a silly statement (or maybe just the .map format; I have no idea about such things). I either need to create individual brush faces manually, fix the FPS issue with patches (even less likely), or figure out what causes Q3MAP2 to spasm whenever it's given a model to create collision from (and fix it). If anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears. This map has technically been in the making since late 2013, and with all the progress I've made on it, I'm really hoping to finally release another map.

Also, if anyone has any suggestions for more tokens, please let me know! I have 10 right now, and if I remember the limitations of Defrag correctly, I have room for 6 more (though the player will still only have to collect 10 to complete the map). I've ripped models and sounds from several games for this project. Some were easier than others, but they all got easier the more experienced I got with this stuff. It's fun to do, at least until I hit a game like Dishonored, where it has no file system or structure whatsoever, and I end up with thousands of randomly-named .wav files that I have to listen to, one at a time. That sucks.

Here's a preview of the contents of the map, as well as a download link: http://kitteh.msgftw.com/3dmaze/

I'm not exactly sure what you're after, but you can create a brush that's completely textured with nodraw and give a single face a different texture?

How about using -patchmeta to turn all the patches into simple faces?

IIRC I always compile with -patchmeta; maybe compiling with that OFF would fix the FPS issue. I dunno.

I'm also pretty sure that 1. creating a brush like that for every wall would take ten times as long as it did to make the map in the first place, and 2. brushes can't have different properties on different faces; they're all nonsolid or they're all solid.

Assuming this isn't a multitude of 2D faces collision issue...

Perhaps try the following:

Convert the map into a model file. This is just raw geometry, they won't have LoD or other patch properties. Do not use the -forcemeta spawnflag, so that they will have no collision data.

Select all the patches and re-texture them with the noclip shader. The patches will now be used strictly for collision, so they are not rendered.

So you're saying, basically do the reverse of what my solution was (use a model with autoclip enabled)? I can try it for sure. I'll edit in about 10 minutes when I know if it works or not

Edit 1: Does compiling for the purposes of creating a model actually care about -patchmeta? What does -patchmeta (and -meta, for that matter) even do?

Edit 2: The model I used that seemed to fix the map, but I used autoclip on, was compiled with -patchmeta. It seemed fine, but I did compile to .obj, not .ase; will the resultant models be affected in different ways? Is one preferable over the other for certain purposes? I've always used .obj simply because it's more widely supported.

Edit 3: I compiled a map with all the patches covered in common/clip, and used a model (3 models actually) to replace the patches, and compiled without -patchmeta. The FPS sucks, even for me, when it used to be solid while using normal patches (clip might still be drawn? It's got nodraw, but this is Q3 we're talking about... I don't know what it's doing here).

Edit 4: Compiling with and without -patchmeta didn't affect the models, so that's not an issue. I also compiled the map itself with and without -patchmeta. Nothing has changed. Using models "works", but it's not a rendering issue, so making the patches not draw isn't a solution. I think it was Shio who told me a long time ago that patches don't work when they're overlapping and inverted the way that mine are. Maybe it was someone else, but it doesn't matter: patches in this setup don't work properly. So I need single brush faces, which does work, but can't be made in any existing version of Radiant.