Visplane Explorer 0.65

Visplane Explorer is a program I'm writing to visualize the number of visplanes needed by the DOOM renderer at any point of a map, as a kind of "heat map". The basics are working, enough for people to try it and get some useful results, though it is not finished or polished yet.

LINK: http://awwports.sourceforge.net/files/visexp065.zip

The right mouse button lets you scroll around, the mouse wheel zooms in and out, these functions are available for keyboard too: cursor keys to scroll, '+' and '-' keys to zoom.

Stuff TO-DO:

• ability to choose a different map without restarting
  
• ability to show drawseg and opening limits too
  
• Hexen support
  

AWESOME. I've always been fascinated by heat maps, and something like this could be very useful in Doom in order to make some landmarks in the map.

What software license is it shipped in, if I may kindly ask?

That's pretty cool. When does it say "Overflow!"? When there are more than 256 visplanes? According to the Doomwiki the limits are 128 for vanilla Doom, 160 for Hexen and 200 for Strife.
Also it'd be nice to know how high the overflow is, not just that there is one.

boris said:

That's pretty cool. When does it say "Overflow!"?

That means an internal limit overflowed. I raised the limits to 256 visplanes, 1024 drawsegs and twice as many openings, but one of these limits overflowed. So when you get pink, things have gone way above the normal limits. Not sure how to best display it though.

P.S. License is GPL, source is in this BZR repository:
http://awwports.bzr.sourceforge.net/bzr/awwports/files/head:/vpo_zoom/

I checked out 10sector.wad with it, and map 17, 19, 26 and 27 don't look right, the heatmap shows mostly black. Map 28 crashes.

Very nice.

How do you get it to generate the actual heatmap? I'm just getting a wireframe although mousing over areas will update "Count" just fine.

Unless that's on the to-do list, of course.

"Press TAB to toggle map"

boris said:

I checked out 10sector.wad with it, and map 17, 19, 26 and 27 don't look right, the heatmap shows mostly black. Map 28 crashes.

For MAP17 (etc), they use a lot of self-referencing linedef tricks and this confuses the logic which finds a sector at a given point. I will need to use R_PointInSubsector() to get the correct sector.

I will look into the MAP28 problem.

P.S. MAP28 will crash DOOM (and Chocorenderlimits) too at a certain spot: x=-2304 y=-4352 angle=45 degrees

P.P.S. hmmm, having looked into it now, got no idea what's going on with MAP17 (etc)

P.P.P.S. actually it looks like memory corruption, initially the visplane data is correct but at some point the data just starts becoming low values.

PPPPPPPPPS: turns out it was the 'solidsegs' array in r_bsp.c which was overflowing, and corrupting memory when it did.