HL2 Map Design Question: Brush or Mesh?

[rockdude86]

aah so thats why when you run into an model (in any game) you many times dont seem to touch it

[Dranore]

3) you build a very low poly collision model that gets compiled into the model as the collision

I'd heard this before. You mention that the collision models should be low poly? Are there situations where that's not true? For example... if you were to create a "terrain" (in quotes because it could be anything the player might need to scale or climb on... could be a vehicle, or anything really concievably) model... wouldn't you want to match it pretty closely so the player were not to float over it or clip into it/slide off of it? Man I wish they'd just release the SDK so I can just read about all this stuff. Poor Zaphod is turning to the Source modding anwsering service. hehe...

-Dranore

[Taylor]

It's a hit box.

Nobody should have any trouble at all making a low poly version accurate enough so the player doesn't go through parts of it or thinks that something is amiss.

[zaphod]

you wouldn't make an entire surface such as terrain out of a model. There are settings you can use to make the collision per-poly but it is very very expensive and there is really no reason to use it except for some very special circumstances.

[Bic-B@ll]

can you use mltiple hit box sets so that you can clip it in different ways or even flag it to not clip at all?

[zaphod]

not unless you made seperate models with different colission models, and yes you can make them non-collideable

[Bic-B@ll]

wow that was teh suparb speedy

im in the library cause ive got study hall, i wrote tht, did my math hw and it was here when i came back D:!

[Dranore]

Another *somewhat* related question for Sourcemasta Zaphod. How expensive are reflective surfaces? For example... If I wanted an uber shiny room, with shiny floors and shiny wooden desks and metal columns... how much does that effect performance? I'm speaking about true reflections that reflect models and all. Does the level of reflectivity effect performance or it is anything above 0 uses the same ammount of power?

-Dranore

[insta]

I'm guessing that if you're mirroring a level (through some fancy shader and whatnot), you would literally double your wpoly/epoly, since you have to draw the same stuff onscreen twice.

[Bic-B@ll]

if you use a flashlight, will the light bounce off the mirror and hit the wall behind it? i noticed that didnt happen in doom

[zaphod]

the only true reflection there is in the engine is with water, wich doubles the polies in your scene. All the other "shiny" stuff in the game is specularity, not reflections, it's uses pre-compiled low resolution cube-maps, and are not expensive at all.

[-Stratesiz-]

Hmmm this is some really interesting stuff. I have a few questions but I forgot them already~ I'll post them later.

[DD]

the only true reflection there is in the engine is with water, wich doubles the polies in your scene. All the other "shiny" stuff in the game is specularity, not reflections, it's uses pre-compiled low resolution cube-maps, and are not expensive at all.

Wait... so the reflection in hl2 water doubles the polies?!!!? I thought it was render to texture. Ho boy~

[zaphod]

thats why it looks so good and is so expensive, there is a "cheap" version of the shader that uses a cubemap instead.

[Dranore]

Do the "cheap" versions still reflect models? :\ Or are those just a cubemap?

-Dranore