GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[GERage]

I've noticed that when Hammer maps with certain geometry (ex. cylinders) are imported into GE, "cracks" in the map often start to appear.



^This crack appears in Bunker 2 near a curved wall btw.

So, what causes these?

[Wreck]

Notice how there are three different triangles composing that section of the floor? It seems as though the two on the right are apparently split apart in a bad spot. They don't meet flush with the tri on the left, so it's leaving a bit of a space. The top and bottom are connected smoothly, but it's that "crack" in the middle that stands out. It even affects the clipping in that room. Try running around there and you'll eventually run into a bump by the top of the stairs, due to missing links.

(this is one of the two halls altered between Bunker i and Bunker ii, so it's possible that they weren't fully looked over and done quickly to connect the new areas)

I'm guessing that Hammer must be handling some geometry in the same fashion. It's probably splitting triangles at poor locations, and leaving a gap between certain tris. Not that it happens a lot, but when it does, it's definitely noticable.
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[flopperr999]

I get these all the time in Hammer while unintentially carving with a non- "traditional" brush.

[GERage]

Maybe cracks happen because of a vertex rounding error? I do know that vertices must use integers for coordinates when they are imported from Hammer to GE. So wouldn't fractional/irrational vertex coords (ex. 1/3, -1/2) be rounded to the nearest integral value and cause the cracks?

[Dragonsbrethren]

That seems likely.

[radorn]

If rounding is to blame, then hammer, the compiling or the program that converts to OBJ is probably the thing to blame here.
The GE editor, afaik, just imports whatever is in the OBJ as is, and I think the OBJ format doesn't support non-integrer coords, and if it did, and GE encountered those the import process would probably fail or give badly corrupted results.

Moreover, most of the time, for adjacent tris, vertices are shared. I mean, ove vertex can connect to many others, not just the other two in a triangle. It's not like each tri has to have 3 dedicated vertices for it. So, a case of rounding would just move that vertex from it's former non-integrer coords to the rounded ones and it would just result in a, possibly unnoticeable, case of deformation, not those cracks.

As a special mention, using Sketchup I sometimes noticed cracks in stuff when using "advanced tools" (ie, other than manual line drawing).
This looks to me like the most probable cause.
Something in the process that takes your input and stores it as an OBJ file is to blame.

[Wreck]

About the only thing I know of that the Editor can often do accidentally, is add some misdrawn tris. Everything should still come out looking fine, but internally, there's the odd triangle that isn't exactly... a triangle. I think this may also be one of the explainations behind the flickering texture flashes that occur via emulation while using some plugins, like Rice's. It could also be playing havoc with backup devices, since most custom built levels won't work on them. If we can weed out those bad apples, perhaps it might help.
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[radorn]

quads? freeform geometry?
OBJ supports these, I think. I once exported a non triangulated room to OBJ from sketchup and when imported into the editor it looked like crap.

[Wreck]

I'm not sure what the root cause of it is. All of the triangles that build the map appear as they should, but some odd extras are included. They're drawn using points from that same area, but draw in an "L" type shape. It doesn't actually form a tri, so it can't be seen at all. I just know about it from going over a custom built sample room. However, I have a feeling that certain emulator graphics plugins do attempt to render these errornous draws, and it causes a strange flicker on the screen, which is of the same texture as the one(s) not properly formed.
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