I aggregated some questions regarding how to pull off certain effects. I'd like to use unmodified id1 progs.dat, which makes certain things difficult or impossible, I guess, but perhaps I'm just not aware of some nifty tricks.

- some maps nowadays have transparent grates. I guess this is a new-ish engine feature (QS? FTE? DP?). I haven't had luck googling around on how this works - can somebody point me to some documentation?

- there doesn't seem to be a straighforward way to embed a .mdl in a map with id1 progs.dat - but is there a hackish way?


-I'd like to do an arena fight with a pentagram on the floor (that's the simple part). As the fight progresses, I'd like flames to ignite at the corners of the pentagram. When all five corners are ignited, the player is transported to a demonic realm (teleport or changelevel). As far as I know, light_flame* can not be toggled on/off. Of course, I can put standard light entities there an toggle then on, but then the question remains on how to make the flames appear. Ideas? (if this cannot be done, I can still change the concept to, e.g., have pillars with demonic symbols raise instead at the corners) 

- some maps nowadays have transparent grates. I guess this is a new-ish engine feature (QS? FTE? DP?). I haven't had luck googling around on how this works - can somebody point me to some documentation?
The last color of the Quake palette- that's the kind of funky pale pink one at the end of the last row- is defined as transparent when used in 2D UI/HUD elements, i.e. the main menu or the (in)famous light_globe entity. In engines that support the feature (alpha masking, fence textures, whatever you want to call it), that same transparency is applied to 3D stuff as well- entities and world geometry. It's as simple as using that color in the areas of the texture you want to be see-through, and adding a left curly brace- that's the pointy parenthesis, {- at the start of the texture's name to tell the engine it has transparent bits, similar to * for water or + for animation.

Two things to keep in mind, though- one, textures can only have one leading character so you can't have a curly brace and a plus sign, meaning no animated-textures-with-transparency (probably possible through a really complex set of cycling doors or something, but generally not worth it), and two, the texture has to be used on a brush entity like a func_wall or func_door or else you'll get unsightly grey or hall-of-mirror-effect areas where parts of the world are cut away from compiling and you can see through them into the void. ericw's tools include multiple entities specifically for this purpose (func_detail_illusionary and func_detail_fence), as well as a handy entity field called _mirrorinside that makes those two types of entities automatically have their textures mirrored to the insides of the brush, meaning an infinitely flat, two-sided fence texture (i.e. Doom style fences) is done by just making a func_detail_fence, adding the mirror field, and applying the skip texture to every outside face except the one you put your fence/grate/whatever texture on. 

And in case you mean glass, just add key of "alpha" and a value between "0.0" and "1.0". No quotes of course. 

alright, I will try that. Darkplaces actually runs the map fairly stably, which is another reason why the ezquake renderer needs to be redone. There are plans to do that.

Introducing `-forcegoodtree` helped the performance by quite a bit, but those slow spots are still apparent. I don't feel or mind them, but apparently other players will, and will cause my map to be depreciated.

I can't exactly give data right now, I'm on a trip. However, I will get back to you through email when I do. I will post my fully compiled map here as well.

It does seem to be caused by entities. When disabling them in the renderer, I get a stable 1300 fps around the map in ezquake (AMD card on linux, which is why my performance is lower than usual, others get way into the 3000s and are affected a lot less than me). With them on, I get the slow spots in ezquake.

@Bal

That is true that the performance is similar between dm6, but one of the things I wanted dm6pro to be is better than the original dm6 in every aspect, including performance. If I'm able to improve it, I will. Also keep in mind that there are people in the competitive community that do notice this stuff, but I honestly think it's a buncha bs most of the time. They all play aerowalk, which has similar "slow spots."

This is also an issue with ezquake, so that's introduced as a problem. Since that's the current engine that competitive players use, I will have to design the map around it. I think it actually may have to somehow do with how inefficient ezquake is at rendering entities, but that's only a theory. It's definitely correlated by my tests.

@Qmaster

Again, I will try to get back to you on that.

-----

Thanks for the great initial support, never got that here before.

On the side, do any of you actually like it? I've been trying to get opinions before I hand it up to the higher players. 

Now that's how to answer a question in mapping help. I've used fence textures once before but I just learned how to do it properly. Cheers. 

Thanks for your comments, this is very helpful! 

Took a peek at that valve documentation, really helped me understand how I actually need to use hint brushes. I doubt they will help, but they might do something. 

When you say that people are complaining about your map's performance, is it "bad performance" in the sense of "only a thousand frames per second instead of ten thousand"? Or is it a performance problem that could actually be noticed without watching an FPS counter? 

newbie question: how do I get so you have to kill/press 2 or more enemies/buttons to trigger something and get it to say "x more to go" 

o nvm I figured out button, through trigger_counter. trying to figure out monsters though 

no wait I'm dumb that's not right 

no wait I'm smart that's actually right 

but I have no idea how to make it work still 

Add a new monster:

"classname" "monster_army"
"target" "t1"

Add another one:

"classname" "monster_army"
"target" "t1"
And another one:
"classname" "monster_army"
"target" "t1"


Then add a trigger_counter:

"classname" "trigger_counter"
"target" "t2"
"targetname""t1"
"count" "3"


Now when you kill the three grunts, the target "t2" will be charched for use, ie a door, a teleporting monster, a light, etc. 

It will be searched for, added to a list, and then all entities on the name will be targeted.

So ya charched I guess, or searchargeted. 

So, it was initially discovered by going around and looking at the FPS counter, however, I was told others would notice it, as well as it being in a key area of the map. 

Min? Max? Average? 1st quartile?

If your min is 65 I wouldn't worry about it. If your min is 50, meh.
If 40, yeesh no good. 

how can I set a command to activate whenever I boot up the game? I'm using quakespasm and it has z-fighting by default but "gl_zfix 1" doesn't save the property when I close out of the game. I don't want to have to type the command every time I test my map. 

Put it in autoexec.cfg

If you don't have an autexec.cfg, create one in notepad and put it in the ID1 folder or mod of your choice. 

didn't work when I tried autoexec.cfg so I tried putting the command into config instead and that did it 

as someone who's brand new to mapping, this messageboard is a godsend. it's over 15 years old and I can still get helpful responses within a couple hours. that's nuts, and it's why I love quake so much 

I'm in the couple thousands here, lol. Average is 1300, max is 1600, but min is 700 in the fated spot, which is noticeable.

@ericw

changed my mind about email, lol. Anyway, so I used r_showtris, and all was revealed. standing in particular spots, the middle arena and the armor room were both being rendered for some reason. Some hint brushes in the entrance to this should help, I hope. I think it has to do with the long bridge brush that connects the semicircle to the hallway. 

The major weird slow spots in my maps are now gone, but there are some that I cant do anything with because they are simply impossible to make any more efficient.

Thanks everyone! 

Well I saw a guy on the Discord chat mentioning it getting down to 4100 fps at one spot. Better throw it all out!!!

Seriously, if anyone is actually concerned about that kind of "frame dip" affecting the gameplay in any way... to me that sounds like "quantum HD gold-plated audiophile cables" level of delusion. I'd be interested to know though if there really is any good reason at all for worrying about framerates (min, avg, variations, whatever) once they are up into that regime. 

I can imagine being concerned about it if you have a brand new PC with high end kit or something along those lines - i'm pretty sure there are still people out there playing Quake on hardware from a decade ago.

It's not about if you can run Crysis, it's about if you can run Quake!