oojackapivvy on 5/4/2011 at 10:38
Having finally got a new computer recently and worked out how to get a load of stuff installed and working on 64 bit, for some reason I had the idea it might be fun to learn more than a bit of geometry creation by doing a revisit of an original LG level.
After some effort to clean up the brush work, and then to ditch everything non-essential, it still didn't load but there was clearly some legacy of the original messing around I'd done when rationalising the build (think UEd 3 might have been better than UEd 2, but still hadn't got 2004 installed), with misplaced pivots and stuff (don't expect duplicated and rotated brushes to necessarily export to t3d correctly) before trying to do anything with it in TEd, so with UEd on one screen and TEd on the other, it was actually only a couple of hours work to recreate it. All lovely, and starting to flesh it all out nicely with some meshes. Then I found the - well, I'd say BSP hole, but actually it was more of the invisible lump variety.
There's no excuse for it either. The brushwork is clean! No amount of effort got rid of it, so back to a prior save which didn't have the offending hole. Found symmetrical ones I'd not noticed before, couldn't get rid of them no matter what I did. The inspiration - export to t3d, import into UEd, build, export to t3d, import to TEd, build. Holes gone. Currently much relieved, but not about to breathe a sigh of relief just yet - I'll save that until I'm positive I've got all the geometry complete and definitely have no holes!
I have no idea what the heck has been done to BSP calculations in T3, but it's bonkers. It gets seriously upset by all manner of things and in particular one thing which is less than ideal anyway, but really seems to cause a jump in file size compared to a cleaner build is to have subtractive brushes extending into each other.
Anyway, main point of the ramble is - if you're near the file size limit, try tidying up the brush work, and if you've got bsp errors, try an export and rebuild in a different version of UEd. If that works, you'll have lost all the texture info, but the smeshes can be easily replaced by re-opening the old map, right clicking one, doing a select all, copying to clipboard and then pasting into the new version.
Beleg Cúthalion on 5/4/2011 at 20:11
I cannot remember any sort of file size limit. There is a (usually far enough) limit for brushes and a property limit, but a size limit...?
nomad of the pacific on 5/4/2011 at 21:39
Quote Posted by oojackapivvy
The inspiration - export to t3d, import into UEd, build, export to t3d, import to TEd, build. Holes gone.
Nicely done! I would never have thought of that. :thumb:
oojackapivvy on 6/4/2011 at 08:18
You're probably right that there isn't a file size limit per se, but I couldn't get it to load until it was small enough, so goodness knows what exactly the limit was! It definitely wasn't the brush limit as I got that right down to around 300. There was definitely an issue with some of the brushes which remained from the original cowgen conversion though, especially where they'd been moved or changed in some way - selecting everything revealed a load of off-set
In any case, while I was trying to figure stuff out I started messing around with the few overlapped brushes that for one reason or another I hadn't yet dealt with, and trying to get the .unr below the size of the largest .unr of an original map, and seeing what it did to the filesize. In one case, pulling a corridor back to just touch the adjoining one knocked it down an alarming 100k or so! I'll see about doing a few tests and if it can be demonstrated on a simple map, I'll post up some screenies - if it really helps, I imagine it could be very useful to some people who need to do just a little bit more to the map, but find it's started crashing.
