GroundFriction

[Neveos]

Should there be any reason why setting the groundfriction of a zoneinfo to a lower setting is having no effect?

There are definitely no other zoneinfo's in this zone, and all I am doing is placing a zoneinfo actor, going to its properties, and setting groundfriction to 0.1, but nothing changes.

[Neveos]

oh... apparently I needed to rebuild after placing the zoneinfo, which I think is strange.

[DDL]

Zone properties are a part of the bsp, rather than something applied afterward. Pretty sure you need to do a full rebuild after messing with zone lighting, too.

[Neveos]

Oh maybe that will fix that fog problem I had. The fog was showing up in the editor but not in the game.

[DDL]

Generally speaking, it's worth doing a full rebuild unless you've only changed the lighting or the paths (in which case rebuild lights/rebuild paths, obv), or have only been messing about with 'gameplay' actors (i.e. pawns, decorations etc). Messing with zoneproperties, levelproperties, and geometry (obviously) usually require a full rebuild.

Exceptions: "rebuild all" actually runs a geometry rebuild, a BSP optimisation, then a lighting rebuild. This middle step is technically non-essential. I have found that for some maps, usually above a certain complexity threshold, a full rebuild can often introduce errors, purely due to this optimisation step.

For these maps therefore, I rebuild geometry alone, then lighting alone.


Also, I have found that (presumably because they require no collision and are not technically on the BSP-tree) sheets can be added to a map without needing a rebuild. Given sheet brushes can do odd things to the BSP sometimes, this may also be useful. They won't zone if you do this, hell no, but if you're using them for, say...graffiti or something: woo.

[Neveos]

That's interesting. I noticed that adding invisible sheets to zone off something sometimes interrupted a "casted" bsp hole from the other side of the map.

I also just found out that the map rebuilds faster the closer the CSG is to the point of origin in the map. I was making two floors, but kept them separate to keep from getting confused on the overhead. I was wrapping things up because the build times were getting out of hand, so I placed the floor under the other one where it was supposed to go, and it built twice as fast to my surprise. Maybe it has to do with how it describes coordinates as distance from origin, and finds the smaller values easier to compute? Useful if you are building only in one quadrant.

[DDL]

I'd suspect it was more to do with the fact they were then closer together: the way it partitions off the collision is loosely based on distance, so having two map elements massively separated means it has to pretty much calculate two separate 'collision trees' (totally made up term, probably) of what connects to what, etc etc, whereas if you bring em closer, it can start sharing elements between them and only need to make the one 'tree'.

Or, hey: you could be right. Fuck knows: the damn editor is a black box of arcane wizardry.

[Neveos]

lol, no I think you may be right. I did have them really far apart. I do notice an interdependence with regards to bsp when it comes to whether a hole is produced or not. Sometimes changing an unrelated part of the map makes the hole disappear. So increasing their interdependence probably does keep it from jumping between the two.