The compass, zones and warp zones

[chris the cynic]

I've been messing around in the editor a bit, today I made a little test thing to try to get a handle on how warp zones work.

Now I've got some questions.

First, it became apparent that what I ended up doing could be simplified immensely if in some places instead of warp zones I simply shuffled some sections of the map around and connected them in a more mundane fashion, but if I did that the compass wouldn't point the way it should in all sections. The obvious solution would be to tell the compass to point in a different direction in certain areas. Is there a way to do that? Also, is there a way to tell the compass to simply not work in a certain area (either have it spin or point in the same direction regardless of where the player is pointing)?

Second, you can look through three warp zones, after that they simply don't show up. I was aware there was such a limitation, but for some reason I thought the number was four when I was planning things. Is there a way to increase how many warp zones deep will be rendered?

Finally, what are zones actually for? I know they can be used to make zones full of water, zones full of gas, zones with no air, zones with fog, zones that kill you, and warp zones, but I've also seen them used in places where none of these things are happening. Places where everything seems perfectly normal, so I'm guessing they have a use somewhat more mundane than the stuff I listed.

[AgentSmithereens]

1 - I'm not completely sure, but the DeusExLevelInfo has a setting called TrueNorth (default to 0). Perhaps if you changed this it could achieve the effect you're looking for.
2 - no idea, I know nothing about warp zones
3 - I think generally, zones which aren't do with water/skies/pain are just to increase the frame rate of the map and to smoothen things up. Remember DX was made a long time ago when computers were no where near as fast as they are today, so they'd need this to avoid any slowdown. From the UC tutorials - "Zones can be used to speed up your level. If you separate your level into several different sections, the game doesn't have so much to process."

[DDL]

Re: the speed up, it's pretty simple. The game is constantly tracing out from your viewpoint to work out how much of the level you can see (and thus how much it needs to render). I believe if may simply consider everything in your current zone as 'render', since it saves time, assuming the zone is reasonably small. For other zones, it considers whether or not you can see a zoneportal to that zone. If so, then it considers that zone for rendering purposes too, but if you CAN'T see that zoneportal, then it disregards the entire zone, speeding things up considerably.

You can actually experiment with this if you make two zones linked by a corridor with a zone portal, and put a window between them. As long as you can see the zone portal, the window functions fine. As soon as you can't, the window becomes a 'hall of mirrors', since it's open out onto a zone that isn't being rendered: the game doesn't account for the fact you could see that zone via a translucent surface.

Compass direction is indeed linked to the deusexlevelinfo, which means you are going to have problems unless you unhook that functionality..but I think that would require making a new compass display, which would require a new HUD, and so on. Window code, man: fuck that shit.

Hrmm..crap, and not only that, it checks for true north once only, so even if you managed to reset the true north for each zone, it would probably ignore that and keep the first one it found.

It's fixable, but it'd be messy/convoluted.

As for render limit, I didn't know it was only three, but if it is, I doubt it's changable. Something as core as level rendering is likely to be fairly intractable. Can you arrange things such that zone to zone transitions are concealed behind walls, etc? The famous halflife zig-zag corridor, for instance? Not exactly subtle, admittedly.

Or are you building a planet?

[chris the cynic]

As for render limit, I didn't know it was only three, but if it is, I doubt it's changable. Something as core as level rendering is likely to be fairly intractable. Can you arrange things such that zone to zone transitions are concealed behind walls, etc? The famous halflife zig-zag corridor, for instance? Not exactly subtle, admittedly.

I think I can probably get away with it in what I'm actually planning to do (maybe, I'll have to look into it some) but in my not at all planned, little test map that I've come to like it feels like if I could just get one more level in then the problem would be nigh unnoticeable. If not then I think two more would do it.

(On a bit of a side note, standing in an empty hallway, firing off a gep gun, watching the rocket go down the hall, cross the hall twice, and finally explode against the wall behind you to your left is surprisingly fun. Given that you're not actually, you know, doing anything other than firing a weapon into an empty hall you wouldn't, or at least I wouldn't, expect it to be very fulfilling.)

It does mean that one idea I had to make what I'm trying to do somewhat less trippy will have to be abandoned because it would double the number of warp zones in certain directions. Also something I'm doing to reduce the number of warp zones considerably which makes transitioning somewhat bumpy around the edges will probably have to be maintained.

For the most part I only expect it to require revisions in areas where my plan was, basically, to show off.

Or are you building a planet?

It has crossed my mind.

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Damn, I thought I posted this this morning.

[DDL]

Ooh, and just to make sure you know: tracefire weapons won't work through warpzones, so don't plan on designing it around lots of bullet-based weaponry..unless you want to recode weapons to fire projectiles, of course.

[chris the cynic]

Ooh, and just to make sure you know: tracefire weapons won't work through warpzones, so don't plan on designing it around lots of bullet-based weaponry..unless you want to recode weapons to fire projectiles, of course.

I do actually know that. What I'm working on right now is largely empty space (in that there is a total lack of NPCs), so I'm not worried about messing up gun battles too much.

I also have in mind a way to justify that in some cases, though not in others, which just got more complicated when I realized that tracers are not subject to the same constraints as the bullets whose paths they're supposed to be tracing.

I've just noticed that carried objects appear to disappear entirely when I pass through a warp zone. (They're not dropped, they just cease to be.) That I did not know about. I can see that getting very irritating very fast.

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Anyway, designing based around weaponry would require me to actually have some skill in level design and some grasp of what makes for good gameplay. Given that I have neither of those things, right now I'm mostly screwing around with architecture.

Also, npcs and warp zones don't seem to mix well based on my limited testing. For some reason they seem to do a better job of crossing warp zones when trying to kill me than they do when trying to simply follow me, but in neither case is it something I'd particularly like to have a player experience.

[Jonas]

Um we did something with the compass in TNM, where it'll always say that north is the direction of the elevator shaft on the space station. I have no idea if it would be of any help for you to look into how that was done.