mitering corners - reduce visleafs? good for optimization?

[Minos]

I always mitter my stuff when i work in bsp. Probably not as important anymore today since most PC's are powerfull enough to run even a messy map in source in highest details and fluid framerates. But it used to be very important in the past. Without mittering 2 triangles more get rendered per corner and if the wall is a static brush it creates a new tiny vis leaf. Now if you have a couple more such tiny vis leafs they will cut each other overproportianaly the more you have and you have very easily a mess of hundrets or thousands of vis leafs where only a couple dozen would be appropiate. This mess has a very negative effect on the vis compile time (what should take 2-3 minutes takes hours) and it also has a bad effect on the performance ingame.

edit:

Found this old pic in my archive:

Pretty much shows what i mean with tiny vis leafs cutting each other and creating a mess. On the button my map after proper mitering, func_detailing and vis optimizing.

Not sure if that's a good example to show what you mean since it's a very old version of Abdallah with almost no brushes converted to func_detail and no hint brushes at all.

I personally never cared about mitering corners. The small performance gain (if it even exists) is not really worth the extra time put on it.

Fun fact: Steppenwolf was actually the guy who taught me how to properly use hint brushes back in the good ol' INS days

[Lord Ned]

For vis its very simple to explain long compile times. The more vis leafs you have up goes the the compile time overproportional. So the difference between a quick compile time and a long compile time sometimes isnt even that big on paper. Just a question of proper optimizing.

Also you have to stop to be so pretentious about it when your test basicly proofed my point. Bsp merging the faces? Take a very very close look at your own example picture.

You don't need to sit here and explain how it works. I know how it works. I already said I was wrong. What else do you want?

[Defrag]

It looks neater and possibly does do a little good, but it's a fairly pointless optimisation. As Chris said, there's little point in spending any time worrying about low-level optimisations. If I can't measure the difference, I don't care.

Besides, it always used to really annoy me when I was resizing brushes and forgot the corner was mitred. IMO you get far more bang for your buck if you do high level visibility sanity checking early on, then do a func_detail / hint brush / LOD pass as you reach the end of development. I had very similar results to stepp on an optimisation pass using the exact same tool, and none of the significant improvements were down to mitring.

[Psy]

Mitering is pointless most of the time. Yes, a lack of mitering may create more visleaves but the performance difference is miniscule and, anyway, compile times are hardly going to suffer because of it.

[Wesley Tack]

I think a good use of func_brush and func_details and having a clean outer layout is good enough, I don't do that mitering thing either and so far I haven't had many weird visleaf or performance issues happening to me. It seems to me like extra work for something you don't really need.

[fonfa]

But then when you miter corners you have a easier time texturing stuff. I always do it because that's how I learnt on goldsrc, that's how my brain works. For me it's easier to visualize the map that way and makes me work faster.