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

[MRKane]

I'm starting this thread because I want to know them!

At present I'm working on the Dam level, and have been keying up extra visibility. Really I need to increase the view distance so that things far away can be seen, but I'm also having issues getting things seen.

I wonder why we need portals at all? Why not just link rooms up with extra visibility?

Another little thing I noticed was that if room03 has rooms01 & 02 in extra visibility, and room04 has room03 as extra visibility, it seems to inherit room03's visibility.

All help appreciated!
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[SubDrag]

I'm afraid I'm not good at the visibility, so waiting for Zoinkity to respond or Wreck, but I've been told by Zoinkity the extra vis is much, much slower than portals.

Also, post your extra vis commands here.

[MRKane]

I've just been using the Extra Visibility editor to link things up, and it's been working fine up until you get out onto the actual Dam area. Another funny thing: There are "floating mountains" (that I've dubbed the: halleluhja mountains) high up in the sky that I've a feeling are actually a loop of the lower part of the Dam BSG. Tricky. Importing in the original visibility commands doesn't seem to work either.

Cheers for the reply!
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[SubDrag]

It might be best to post in case there is an error with Visibility editor. I don't think anyones actually used it before!

[MRKane]

RALMAFO! Take it from me: it seems to work up until things actually get messy! I'll bring the data and might also need to send through the level in progress for you to have a looksie just in case I've done something really stupid. This is the Dam, and even in its original platform is was difficult to deal with
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[00action]

hey MRKane i dont mind having a little look if you want me to, ive messed about with visibilty problems alot, not sure if i can help but il have a look.
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[MRKane]

Hey 00action. I might just have to send it your way as Im not managing to make any progress getting things going on this end. Flick me a pm
With your email and I'll post some stuff through.

Thanks a heap!
_________________
No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[bmw]

SubDrag wrote:

It might be best to post in case there is an error with Visibility editor. I don't think anyones actually used it before!

I used the visibility editor in my cabin fever level because portals were just not working the way I wanted them to work. Extra visibility fixed those issues. I never had any problems using the editor. However I cannot comment on framerate slowdown since I never finished the level - but for the amount that I had finished all worked smoothly.

[MRKane]

For what I've been using it for it seems to have been working well also. The thing that really interested me was adding visiblity to a room seemed to inherit its portal visiblity which was a slick work-around that solved some issues.

I was wondering if there was something similar with sections on the dam area and all the extra portals littered all over the show. Still, no luck there. I've pinged it across to 00Action to have a look at, fingers crossed he'll solve it and we'll get the Dam going!
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[zoinkity]

PD simplified the non-portal system. Normally there would be different stacked threads of it and you'd have to explicitly mention what portals could be seen or see through what additional rooms.

The portal room system is a much faster way of selecting which rooms will be drawn precisely because of the limitation, much the same way that the AI would be painfully to impossibly slow if you weren't using the clipping engine or didn't rely on detection paths. Portals will only render rooms that can be seen through a visible portal, and that limits the detection first to rooms directly connected to the player, then rooms directly connected to them, etc.
Non-portals act as an exception, rendering the room at any time one of the conditions are true. Part of the issue there is even when not visible the room may be rendered, and the other part is the amount of overhead involved in processing the microcode and handling the tables used by the exception engine. If scripted very well you can circumvent most of the inherant problems, but in actual fact most of the lower-level visibility commands aren't really understood. The ones we use are all the basic "make room turn on" kinds of things.
Keep in mind too that anything within a lit room is also lit.

PD was designed more for speed than for complexity. PD's biggest advantage is how it used 8MB expansion pak to load the entirety of stages into memory, cutting out the overhead in of load/decompress/expand/hook method. That's one big reason why inherantly things run faster in PD. However, if you don't use the portal engine then a much larger number of those room DLs will be processed for each player, so you run a fair chance of bogging down the RDP. Concider, for instance, how being in any open-air area of Cradle processes the entire open-air area of Cradle. You don't want to do that unless you have to.
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[MRKane]

Cheers Zoinkity! The first thing that springs to mind here is that I should give some sort of "portal stacking" a crack to allow extra visibility. This means positioning portals in such a way as to house extra calls. For instance if room b is above room a (as background like a mountain) will throwing a portal up in the sky enable visibility? Do they need to be linked by clipping? It's a shame that portals only junction two calls.

When in doubt: fog.
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[MRKane]

I'm going to bump this again as I'm still not winning here and would really like to see the dam into goldeneyeX and am still having no luck in this department. Am beginning to think that the dam is a bit of a "special case"
_________________
No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[MRKane]

Villa is an excellent example of how it's done properly! And the Dam is an excellent example of well...this is going to be difficult. It would appear that the solution is setting up a lattice of interconnected portals that junction from one to the other. I can setup such an array once I've got the basics down pat - it would appear that is uses non-existant rooms as proxys that the others junction to. It's a real mess of ordered stuff out there...

I've got a question (because I can't find it anywhere) where can I adjust the view distance? I've looked and can't find it anywhere!
_________________
No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[SubDrag]

Far fog maybe?

[MRKane]

Cheers for the reply!

I wondered about that but haven't had too much luck with it (I've also wondered why I'm obsessed with this level...but that's another matter). If there is no "proper number" I might have to start looking into the portal latticing to see if there's any hints there. My gut says its something to do with the space between portals and perhaps the visibility settings (which seem to link null rooms in the villa).

I'm not totally sure that the level will work in its present form, but I'm sure that a bit of experimentation will help. I mean they did find the Higgs boson so how hard can it be to crack perfect dark

Next challenge: a tank in perfect dark!
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!