25 Hours and Counting!

[corkscru74]

Surely this can't be right. I'm in the early stages of a map and have been compiling and checking a few times already. It's an outdoors map with a simple sky (no 3d Skybox), a pool of water and a displacement surface as a 'swampy pond thing'. I add an Environment light for the sun and it takes slightly longer to compile. I add a spotlight within a little hut and I'm now in my 25th hour of compiling!!!

Surely that can't be right? I'm running a 2.8Ghz P4 with HT, 1Gb Ram, 9800 pro (don't think that matters when compiling) so I don't think I'm struggling with a minimum system.

I've looked at the SDK docs from Valve but it's a bit over my head to be honest. I guess I could shrink the map - but I don't want to lose the effect of it being outside, if I bring the walls in it might look stupid.

I just want to check - I'm s'posed to make my map out of a single, hollow cube right? Should I then put a nodraw texture on the outsides? And also the inside floor if it's covered by other stuff?

Anyone else had similar compile times?

 

[Pesmerga]

Don't ever spend more than 1 hour on compiling :| hammer has obviously either crashed or is having seizures.

 

[Argyll]

Try with Nem's Batch Compiler.

 

[[AciD ZerO]]

Pesmerga is right, it had to of been a glitch or that it crashed.

 

[AgentXen]

Over an hour of compile time is reasonable for a large outdoor map.
But... 24 hours.... thats too much.
Im up to 2 Hours and 30 Minutes for a City map i am doing for one of the episodes of discovery.
And its quite large. I would post a picture but... i dont want to give much away.

 

[Hippy]

How can I register on Nem's Batch Compiler. page. ??

If I unders try to register nothing happens . Do I something wrong ?

 

[CREMATOR666]

Try to use occluders and func_detail, I once made an outdoor map, too. Took me 8 hours to compile :|

 

[Funky Munky]

I can't but laugh at this guy thinking his map took over 25 hours to compile.

 

[Ti133700N]

No Pesmerga is not right, Hammer always seem to be crashed but its still compiling. I once compiled a map for CS 1.6 that took a month to compile so my answer would be, your map will probably finish to download someday but your map probably need alot of optimisation.

I suggest you to search the forums on ways to optimize your map to shorten the compile time and up the fps at the same time.

D'ont use newb brush (big hollowed cube to enclose your level, that's the #1 cause of a long compile).

Use the nodraw texture on every face that can be seen.

 

[2Fast4U]

Use the nodraw texture on every face that can be seen.

Now that's a typo

 

[corkscru74]

I can't but laugh at this guy thinking his map took over 25 hours to compile.

Laugh away - I gave up at the 36 hour mark ;(

Thing is, it WAS still compiling - just really slowly! I went to work, came home and it had moved 2 dots along. But after leaving it for another night and seeing no progress at all I gave up.

So if I made a massive cube to surround my map with the default brick texture but changed all of the faces that couldn't be seen (outside and floor as is hidden beneath a displacement surface) that's would be ok?

Sorry to sound like such a noob but these things aren't explained in any of the tutorials coz anyone writing a tutorial finds it obvious. I still don't know how I'm gonna add occluders to the map (I don't know what to block coz it's all pretty open) but I'll give it a try.

Cheers for the help as always - it's good to know there's support from a friendly bunch just a mouse-click away.

 

[Ti133700N]

No Pesmerga is not right, Hammer always seem to be crashed but its still compiling. I once compiled a map for CS 1.6 that took a month to compile so my answer would be, your map will probably finish to download someday but your map probably need alot of optimisation.

I suggest you to search the forums on ways to optimize your map to shorten the compile time and up the fps at the same time.

D'ont use newb brush (big hollowed cube to enclose your level, that's the #1 cause of a long compile).

Use the nodraw texture on every face that can't be seen.

Edit: Sorry for the typo
Hum... why did it add another post instead of editing the first post?... Sorry... Hum.. ok Since it added another post I'll try to write something usefull.

Can you post a screenshot of your map in Hammer so we could give you some guidelines on what to do to optimize your map? There are not many tutorials on map optimisations because the methods of optimisation can be different depending on the maps. But if you search for the nodraw texture, hint, occluders, you'll probably find a good tut.

 

[Pesmerga]

On a decent computer, 1 hour should be plenty for normal maps. Larger maps may require up to 2 hours, but compile times for relatively complex maps on hl1 took 1-2 hours. Besides, I try to take full advantage of the cordon boundaries.

 

[Frosty288]

lmao never took me more then a few minutes to compile a large map :/

 

[AgentXen]

Its not really the size of the map that matters. Its how many polygons are there. Here is what i have figured out.
Compileing a map that is 3 times the height of the player and useing 100% of the x,y grid will take approximatly 27 minutes. (Only haveing a floor)

Compileing a map that is 250 times the height of the player, adding a shit load of high skyscrapers/buildings and useing 100% of the x,y grid will take approximatly 5 hours and 30 minutes. (Includeing miles of streets and lots of models)

 

[Dan]

is you go over an hour you've definitely got some vis leaf saw into leaf errors caused by the rounding of decimal places. These aren't fatal but they slow down the compiling a ton and cause visual glitches in the map. Or atleast that's how it was with old HL

 

[Fontainne]

my large city map took forever to compile until I restructured the map to use Func_Detail. previously everything was just a standard brush (5 or 6 thousand brushes and hundreds of thousands of poly's). The Light compile took a little longer this time but the area where it would take forever (visleaf) went down drastically to an hour at most. so I can now compile my map in about 2 1/2 hours.

 

[Jangle]

that took a month to compile

a month? how big was it? did you leave your pc on for a whole month?

 

[DEATH eVADER]

Make sure theres not a tick in the box saying 'run game after compile', I don't think valve have fixed that problem yet

 

[Ti133700N]

a month? how big was it? did you leave your pc on for a whole month?

The map was de_tchernobyl for CS 1.6. Since there were no props for the old HL engine, I used brushes and every limit of the engine was pushed to the max. If I added a brush another was disapearing .

I used NetVis to compile so we were always about 5 to 10 to compile the map and the main compile was on my friend's computer (P4 2.6 1Gig RAM), he couldn't close his comp for a month. We had to start the compile over about 3 times because of Windows's nice freeze feature.