No interests so project is dead
Edited by Erutypus on Jun 25, 2019 at 02:42 AM

impressive stuff

This is very, very cool. Excited to see how it develops. The overall geometry is pretty accurate from the screenshots. Getting more complex materials later on might be a pain, but this is a great start to something that looks promising.


Edit:


For reference, by cutting out the courtyard and optimizing the geometry while preserving material edges, I was able to get the section 5 BSP down to about 45K polys. I shaved another 3-4k off by redrawing overcomplex sections of the BSP from there. Once it got <42K I was satisfied, but there's a lot of unoptimized geometry I could still update. And, unfortunately, my tunnels use a lot of geometry that they really shouldn't be, so that would save you a lot as well.

So, with sub-optimized rips that need minimum material updating you can get an average ODST BSP down to ~41K faces each. That's what the average for each of my FOM geometry pieces ends up being. I have 6 BSP sections @ 41K each, so you should in theory be able to get a full ODST BSP into CE out of ripped geometry as opposed to going from scratch.

I think that might be a better avenue to go about. But you seem to churn out this geometry fairly quickly, so IDK.
Edited by DeadHamster on Mar 14, 2019 at 06:05 AM

No interests so project is dead
Edited by Erutypus on Jun 25, 2019 at 02:42 AM

Vanilla Halo, with no enhancements, can render approximately 16k triangles at a time. With HAC2, that number is doubled to 32k. OpenSauce is in the middle at 24k.

You would separate each "section" into an individual BSP section, and then find a way to load them with two bay doors or something else. That's about how ODST did it, but you definitely cannot combine all of the sections together into a single BSP structure. You would need to make one for each section, and then use (switch_bsp) or a BSP switching Trigger Volume to make the swap.

What that 24k/32k limit means is level portalling. Are you familiar with +portal and +exactportal? You're gonna be soon. They're planes that divide open sections of the map. The areas the player aren't in are culled and don't render, which let's Halo better decide how to get the total number of polys from 42k down to either 24k or 32k. OpenSauce has a lot of other enhancements for Single Player. IDK if HAC2 even works anymore, I've always detested it.

You won't get these BSPs rendering in Vanilla stock Halo, 16K just isn't enough, if you divide the level into too many sections the engine will cull areas that are in plain view. Realistically you should be splitting a level down based on level geometry into about 4-5 areas. If you want help in this, let me know. there is NO documentation that properly explains how to do these; everything you find will say to make a grid and extrude it past the sky. This is rubbish, it works about as well as it sounds it would work. From what I've gathered, BSP Portalling was designed to enhance rendering performance. Helping bypass rendering limits is a nice side effect.



There's a ton of subtle rules to portals. A single plane can't bisect multiple open areas, portals and exact portals ar I've been figuring a lot of these out.

DeadHamster #8410

on Discord. Happy to provide assistance.
Edited by DeadHamster on Mar 14, 2019 at 06:09 PM



Edit:


After double checking my geometry I want to correct;

The ODST BSP got down to about 39K Polys, not 42k. I use over 3K on the tunnels that connect the BSPs. Horribly inefficient I know. But better news for you.
Edited by DeadHamster on Mar 15, 2019 at 05:27 AM

No interests so project is dead
Edited by Erutypus on Jun 25, 2019 at 02:41 AM