AC-Map Design/Clipping etc.

[3XIX]

You can use clip entities, which support 45° rotation and tilting since v1.3. It is a little clumsy to set it up correctly, but it has everything you'd need:



For this particular instance (see screenshot) the command would be /newent clip 0 4 10 9 0 0 3, the last digit is the rotation. However, on this scale it would be a pain in the neck to set all those clips up manually.

I have some faint memory of someone explaining that clip collision is way more costly than geometry collision. Therefore I imagine using geometry to 'block out' the map might indeed be more efficient.

As far as I can tell, any surface does stop bullets. I tried it with this map and when I shot with the sniper rifle into the edge of a container I could not see the bullet trail go through, so I guess this already works as expected.

Anyhow, I don't quite understand what exactly you have done here. It seems all those technicalities you mentioned are only relevant to the editor you used for creating the model, or did you actually change AC's rendering pipeline and recompiled a modified client?

I'm asking because I managed to reproduce this in the vanilla v1.3.0.2 client with basically the same performance, simply using your map and the model, which btw., you should have put in a separate folder rather than overwriting one of the most used default models. In any case, there's absolutely no need to ship the entire game folder even if you modified the binary.

However, this all still does not work because lighting is completely f*cked up. Ever tried to place a light entity in there? Even worse, with dynamic shadows ('stencil') enabled, when the camera is fully 'within a shadow' the shadows suddenly flip, that is, the light areas become the dark areas and vice versa.

Besides that, 4K resolution is too much, even if this wasn't AC we were talking about. That one 'map', which is basically simple 8-vertices boxes with 5 different skins for containers, 1 texture for a crate and 1 floor texture takes up 30+ MB. That's almost half the size of the actual AC download. As much as you care about performance you should also care about data size optimization. I guess you could chop the texture sizes in half, maybe even smaller than that and it wouldn't look all that different ingame.

Finally, and I guess I have said this in the past already. This entire approach of building a map completely in some CAD editor and load it into AC as one mapmodel is not feasible.

I don't mean to be harsh or something, but you should take a step back and think about what you are actually trying to achieve here. I guess most of what you have in mind is already possible with the engine (we have high res texture support for geometry now), it only takes new high quality assets and some advanced mapping skills to get there.

Will have to check the newent clip method, as far i saw bullet trails stop when hitting a surface no matter if clipped etc. but players would still receive damage (atleast bots do) so idk about that. 

The technical stuff i mentioned are indicators for performance, basicly meaning that for better graphics we would have to keep the vertices as low as possible, combining as much models as possible, higher resolution textures. 

And i havent done anything to the engine itself, it only was easier to zip the whole game instead of sorting the files, since it should be seen as showcase of a different way to create maps in Assault Cube, to archive better quality and other map design.

Also i didnt knew that AC map editor supports 4k by now, but while thinking about it...how would you create a container for example, that would require 4-6 textures instead of 1, leading to more drawcalls and surface changes (lower frames per second)

High quality assets we wont be able to do without losing alot frames per second, only if we keep vertices low and textures high.

My focus/vision is high fps, better graphics. In general i think the game could be enjoyable for more people, but many no more or dont wanna see washed out surfaces etc. The map opencage as its called in the game line of sight has a reason behind, we will have to think about scenes in reality which are totaly human created, like a harbour/shipment cause we like to build cubish, mostly to reduce production costs but knowing that and finding areas to recreate is the key, also indoor maps would be possible using cubes mostly. 

And doesnt the map design feel completly different/new, if you spawn some bots you could imagine how it would feel to play and dont tell me it doesnt look nice...as you said yourself 8verts each container, i mean sure i could go for 200 verts each container (still ultra low poly) but there are over 100 containers in the map meaning that it would take 20.000 verts (include shadows and you end up with 40.000) while an old GPU would still be able to reach over 144 fps with that it could be done, but then you have to check pickups, weapons etc. and obviously player models count itself 32 players on a map would lead to another 40.000 verts, so things stack up quickly and we´re easily at 100.000 vertices in a scene. I wanna keep the requirements pretty much same, except for disk space (even there i compress the textures to a minimum) but at the end im not a magician.

Edit: To the shadows, thats due to stencil shadows working for models only, they have an atlas size max at moment its set to 1024 (you can check within the model md3.cfg, also modelscale itself has an effect on it (would have to check to increase the model size in blender) i also tought about overlaying shadows on textures (had done that but would require alot more diskspace, with the benefit of not having double vertices, since shadows are static anyway) rn its solution finding to make it work for AC and most maps you dont have any shadows except for models?.

Some pickups in work:


Ammobox and Pistolclip (changed to simple .45 bullet carton) probably will stay, Vest i replaced with an Armor Plate, all reasons of performance.

In general while playing and while they´re moving you wont notice the cubish design that much, also "fake" normals give the slight bump effect. Colors are not final.

Note: Im using an RTX3070, 1000 fps is the limit of the fps counter, the true fps is higher. Ported to a new engine its around 5000 fps, honestly it would make things easier (baking shadows/lighting etc.) but i choose to also include/produce for AC, the fps of 5000 is mainly due to multi CPU cores delivering data to the GPU.