I just remembered something that it seems not many people know, so I thought it'd be good to tell you guys. It takes up less tag space to make exact_portals completely coplanar. Like, use the "Make Planar" tool in the sidebar in 3dsmax to align the edges that are being capped by a portal. I've noticed that the way halo stores portals in the bsp tags is as polygons rather than triangles. It gives a list of the vertices for each piece of a portal and nothing else. If you make a portal perfectly flat then it doesn't need to break the portal up into individual triangles.

Since there is a limit in Halo (idk about OS though) on how many individual portal geometries can exist in a tag, this is how you can get the most definition out of portals. When I was portalling Maridia when I finished up the bsp I made everything as exact portals, but it kept hitting a limit on number of portals in the map. I was like 2x over the limit. I made as many of them as I could be coplanar and it cut my portal usage down to like 1/5. Didn't have to delete any portals, just had to planarize them.

If you could benefit from having MORE portal geometry in a bsp this will allow you to consolidate the portal geometry and give you more portals to work with.

Sometimes tool will slice a portal a few times anyway because of the way it stores geometry in binary space partitions. It can't really be helped.

This is what I'm talking about when I said halo stores them as polygons.



HTH

Awesome. Ill be sure to keep this in mind :)

Portals thread? Portals thread.

Everything OP is indeed true, it's definitely something to verify before exporting.

Another tip: when beginning to portal a map, start by dividing the map with exact_portals. I generally start on one side of the map (not the middle) and work my way across. I use exact portals to section-off entire rooms and large areas. In order to compile correctly, special attention needs to be paid to the normals of these exact portals. Basically, all normals of the exact_portals closing off a cluster (section) need to be facing the same direction - either all backfacing or all front-facing. A good way to check this is imagine yourself in the room you just portalled off. If you are in a room with 3 entrances, those 3 exact_portals need to all be facing in, or out. Not a mix.

Once you've divided up your map with exact_portals, you can use ordinary portals to further split up a section. For example, if you have a hallway that is U-shaped, with entrances at each end of the U, you would place the exact_portals at the entrances. Then, you could place an ordinary portal at the bottom of the U. This way, when the player enters the hallway through the entrance at one end of the U, only half the hallway is drawn (as long as the player is standing in a spot where the geometry on the other side of the ordinary portal isn't in his sightline).

For some, this is basic knowledge. For others, it's a revelation because of the lack of documentation. The HEK tutorial is a poor example of what can be done with portals. For concrete examples, rip a Bungie map and take a look at how portals are set up (to differentiate which are exact_portals and which are ordinary, I observed that Bungie generally uses exact_portals in doorways, while ordinary portals are usually big planes splitting up rooms or large areas). It is easy to identify them if you look according to the general rules I described above.

Portent is another great example of portals done right.

To test your portals, use rasterizer_wireframe 1. You might have to remove hac2 for it to work, though (at least in my experience).

Anyone else got portal-wisdom to share?

Just you.

You covered p much everything that someone would need to know. You made Olympus mons right?
Edited by Wolf_ on Sep 8, 2014 at 04:36 AM

Nah haven't released anything.

yet...

Lucidity, 2016 unconfirmed.

[xx(]