Compile Stuck

[navyseal2004]

Can anyone help me? My compile for a particular map always jams at the portal flow. How can I remedy this?

 

[The Dark Elf]

are you sure its stuck and not just slow? Compiling maps can take between a few seconds to a few hours, and in some cases a day or so.

Task Manager will probably report it as not responding, even when its still working.

 

[MrMan]

It's not jammed, it just takes frickin ages....you can either leave it (could be hours) or compile your map in normal mode rather than expert and put fast vis on

EDIT: grr just beat me elf

 

[navyseal2004]

Well I left it overnight and it didn't even finish in the morning! (6 hours)

 

[AcousticToad]

You might have errors modelwise, I had some buildings that where set as prop_dynamic when they needed to be static, it was compiling for 2 days and didn't even finish, I changed the models and it did it in 5min.

Also, the portal faces were high (13, 082) and it took a long time to compile, putting nodraw textures on everything except the visible surfaces got them down to 372 and a compile time was just a few minutes.

 

[ThaDon]

The long compiling time has something to do with how mutch light you have in your map. Add a few extra light, and the problem should be solved

 

[DoctorGordon3]

The long compiling time has something to do with how mutch light you have in your map. Add a few extra light, and the problem should be solved

So wait, if i put more light in my map....it'll compile faster?

Right now i have just 1 normal light and an environment light with less than 50 brushes, and it takes hours to compile.

 

[DoctorGordon3]

**bump**

 

[JFry]

hehe no that is totally untrue. For one thing, portalflow occurs in vis, which has nothing to do with light. Adding more lights takes longer because rad needs to calculate light maps on every face that the lights hit.

 

[DoctorGordon3]

Side Question:

I have a single light in a big outdoor map, is there some type of bounding box i can put around the light so it doesnt shoot out infinitely far? Cause it takes forever to compile with it (over 5 hours).

 

[Nostradamus]

Okay step 1:
Take all brushes which are going down into bigger surfaces and tie them to func_detail
this can be stuff like poles, table legs etc... all stuff that will cause the other meshes to be sliced up while compiling... thing objects you might have carved especially...

Step 2 if previous didn't help enough

set vis to fast.

should work wonders.
My map went from taking more than 3 days.. thats 3x24 hours(didn't bother with finishing the compile after that), to about 5 minutes

 

[navyseal2004]

Thanks. What about floors?

 

[pmab]

you will probably need floors to seal the map and block visibility, so tying them to entities is probably a bad idea.

 

[bobscape]

yep, i had the same probem....

It started when i put in a big stair case. Setting vis to fast fixed it for me but quite how i'm gonna do a final compile i'm not sure.

 

[xtremdys]

Hint brushes work wonders.

I had a basic stairwell a few levels high that took four hours to compile initially. I placed hint brushes between each stair level ( I think each level was about 10 stairs...) and my compile time dropped down to about 30 minutes.

Becareful with what you make detail. You need solid structures to block vis ingame or you will be rendering areas/objects the players cannot see.

 

[DoctorGordon3]

Hint brushes work wonders.

I had a basic stairwell a few levels high that took four hours to compile initially. I placed hint brushes between each stair level ( I think each level was about 10 stairs...) and my compile time dropped down to about 30 minutes.

So whats does this "hint" brush do then?

 

[DoctorGordon3]

**bump**

 

[xtremdys]

Hint brushes create portals within portals basically. I *think* a basic portal area during compiling is 1024x1024. That in turn is processed into leafs where as the vis "triangles" are calculated. Placing hint brushes tells the compiler where you want the portals to be. Breaking up high detal areas will cause them to be compiled seperate from the less detailed area, where as before the hint brush was placed compiling the less detail area was given the same resources as the high detailed area.

This is my interpretation from what I have been able to find.

The theory behind it in my words: smaller portals, less compile time.

Like I said I went from 4 hours to 30 minutes just using hint brushes, but I did redo the whole room and got it under 5 minutes. It was bad construction on my part to begin with. I have a bad habbit of tossing too many ideas in at once.

 

[navyseal2004]

How do you apply a hint brush then?

 

[The Dark Elf]

How do you apply a hint brush then?

http://www.valve-erc.com/srcsdk/Levels/performance_and_visibility.html

tells you on there.

 

[DoctorGordon3]

Is it me or does Valve's documentation suck? Infinitely cryptic to read i tell you. The docs that came with the original hl1 sdk were much better. Valve tried to be too formal with this new stuff.

Also, while im complaing.....why the blast does their dang engine need us to put in these hints and no-draw surfaces? That could all easily be recognized as we compile.

Oh and, thanks for the reponse xtremdys.

 

[The Dark Elf]

make a bursh, make all surfaces the skip texture, then add the hint texture on the surfaces you want to cut with (imagine that the brush only exists as a slice through the map, the skip textures are basically deleting all the faces in a brush, leaving the hint ones to do the cutting.

Then place them in the correct places, depending on the map.

Done.

-

I personally like the whole brush texture effecting how the compile/engine behaves. Open to a lot of playing about for a coder I would imagine, so much simpler to setup I guess for them.