Need help with these HOMs and texture offset problem

Ok, so today I finally decided to run through one of my maps in Chocolate Doom, and I'm kind of paying the price for waiting that long to do so.

In the main room of my map, in Chocolate Doom, I see a lot of HOMs that I did not see in other source ports. All of the sectors in the room are properly closed, there are no missing textures, and so on. However, the HOMs disappear when you get closer to where the HOMs are appearing. Here are some pictures of that.

http://imgur.com/YVveA,wWawR,wsEu1,orUQO

You can navigate up top using "First image, second image, etc".

Also, there is a problem later on in the map. Chocolate Doom crashes when I look at these textures. I used the GRAY2 texture (a gray texture with a vent) and offset it so that you can see the entire texture (it's 64x72). The sectors these textures are within are 72 units high, so it fufills the entire height of the texture. I made these textures double sided, so you can walk through them (the closest thing I could get to walking through a vent in Doom). It has its own lindef, so all there is to it is a front and back middle texture. This only crashes in Chocolate Doom. This is what it looks like in other source ports.

Here is an image:



As you can see, the texture is on its own linedef, one unit apart from the lower ICKWALL texture (you can see a gray floor between the floor, too).

If you need the WAD, let me know. I really want my map to be compatible with all shapes and sizes of Doom.

Unless there is a limitation in Vanilla Doom that I don't know about.

I'd suggest you try running the map in Chocorenderlimits and see what it says. Is Chocolate Doom reporting anything of interest in stderr.txt or stdout.txt?

Thank you, I'll try that out and see what I can do with it.

Btw, I was able to look at that GRAY2 texture without having Chocolate Doom crash. This is what that GRAY2 offsetted texture looks like in Chocolate Doom.



Can somebody explain to me why that is happening?

The rendering errors and crashes are because you effectively can't use a multi-patch texture (such as GRAY2) as a midtexture on a 2-sided line in vanilla Doom.

Thank you for the info. Do you have any alternative ideas to what I could do?

Also, I tried the chocorenderlimits thing. So I get the HOMs when the "SEG" value exceeds 256. What does the "SEG" mean and what does the 256 limitation mean?

EDIT: I copied the room from the map into a new WAD and have uploaded it so you can test/see for yourself.

Thanks.

http://www.filesavr.com/NDY8CRBH80CJN61

peach freak said:

So I get the HOMs when the "SEG" value exceeds 256. What does the "SEG" mean and what does the 256 limitation mean?

Drawsegs overflow - caused primarily by the 140 sector grand stairway. I'll have a fiddle with it later to see how far it needs to be simplified for vanilla.

peach freak said:

Thank you for the info. Do you have any alternative ideas to what I could do?

Extract each patch graphic of the texture (from doom2.wad), assemble them in something like MSPaint, and import it into your pwad as a single-patch texture. Textures are sometimes comprised of multiple graphics, and the error you're getting is called the Medusa effect. It happens with the conditions Essel explained.

GreyGhost said:

Drawsegs overflow - caused primarily by the 140 sector grand stairway. I'll have a fiddle with it later to see how far it needs to be simplified for vanilla.

I thought it may have had something to do with that.

Would the amount of segs be reduced if I merged those little square sectors that lay on each side of the red carpets on the staircases?

Also, the "grand stairway" is suppoosed to resemble the Resident Evil mansion. So yeah, it's a pretty hefty map if you want to see it in full.

And EQ, thanks, I'll try fiddling with that later on.

peach freak said:

Would the amount of segs be reduced if I merged those little square sectors that lay on each side of the red carpets on the staircases?

Yep - merging them with the carpet sectors makes a big difference, you could also merge the railing sectors beside the top landings.

peach freak said:

Would the amount of segs be reduced if I merged those little square sectors that lay on each side of the red carpets on the staircases?

Also, the "grand stairway" is suppoosed to resemble the Resident Evil mansion. So yeah, it's a pretty hefty map if you want to see it in full.

No, probably not. If it's how I'm imagining it, you have a staircase, with each step split into three sectors (the middle being carpet), right? So no, merging sectors would not do anything to reduce SEGS (Edit: sorry, nevermind; was not thinking clearly :p). A SEG is a line segment that is generated when the nodebuilder splits sectors in subsectors.

To really understand what's going on here, you need to know that all sectors must be broken down into convex shapes when the nodes are built. So if I had an L-shaped sector, it would have to be divided somewhere and broken into two rectangles. Imagine that it looks something like this:



Note this might not be 100% accurate, but it helps to illustrate. In image A, this is what you have when you've just completed your L-shaped map and before you've decided to build its nodes. In B, the nodebuilder is run and decides to break down the sector into an upper and lower subsector so the map can be properly rendered in-game. In C, the nodebuilder takes your map, and saves the NODES, as well as the SEGS and SSECTORS lists (amongst other lumps) into the wad. In the above, the green counts remain unchanged, while red/blue ones are generated (or modified) by the nodebuilder. See the blue lines? Those are your segs. The linedefs don't change, but the nodebuilder keeps track of where the linedefs were split and stores them as SEGS. There are two SEG limits: the maximum viewable at once, and the maximum there can be in the entire map (which is a lot).

To reduce the number of SEGS in a particular scene, you have to pretty much guess how sectors are split and avoid cases where undesirable splits will occur, or just do it by trial and error. Imagine your sectors not as the shapes they appear as, but how they might be arranged into smaller rectangles. You can sometimes align your sectors in a way where they are not split into multiple subsectors, but this is harder than it seems.

Merging sectors does not matter in your case, because those sectors will still be split into smaller subsectors, and if they are already convex, there is nothing you can do other than simplify the geometry that is viewable at any given time...

Edit: Hold on, looking at the map :p

Meh, actually it won't let me download it. Just downloads some image file instead... I suspect GrayGhost is correct though. If you get rid of the "carpet" it will drastically reduce the SEG count for that area. Another suggestion would be to increase the step height, reducing the need for too many steps.

I've mirrored the map on my MediaFire account, hopefully that won't give you any grief.

peach freak said:

Also, the "grand stairway" is suppoosed to resemble the Resident Evil mansion. So yeah, it's a pretty hefty map if you want to see it in full.

That stairway would look grander with a decent set of hand rails. Try these - they're part MIDBARS3, part BROWN96 and already in place. I'll resist the temptation to see the full map before it's ready. ;-)

Wow, those RAIL textures are awesome! Thanks!

I have other staircases with railings in them, and I'll get around to replacing my MIDBARS3 railings with actual railings LOL.

How hard are these to align? Look like it'd be a pain and time-consuming.

Man, to think that there may have been other custom textures I may have wanted in this map. Now I forgot, lol.

And EQ, I tried your suggestion. Took out the vent patch and one of the gray patches and slapped them into one image on Paint, and made a 64x64 GRAYVENT picture. I'm still working out things on Doom Builder, but that should ultmately do the trick and please Vanilla Doom, right?

You might want to make it a 64x128 texture though (just copy and paste below), or else you might run into a different texture error when it tiles vertically. :)

But yeah, as long as you've added the texture to TEXTURE1 and PNAMES, and the image is stored in the PWAD as Doom's picture format (and not something like PNG or BMP), it will work fine.

The error you're hinting at would be the tutti-frutti one, right?

Also, if I made it a 64x128 texture and tried to make it a middle texture on a 2 sided line (and the surrounding sectors are 64 units tall), wouldn't the bottom half of the texture (the non-vent part) "impale" through the floor? I was having this problem earlier, I believe, which is why I made the little passage 64 units tall.

EDIT: I *think* I figured out when textures "impale" through the floor. A middle texture that's offset vertically downwards will only impale through the floor if the surrounding floor textures are all of the same, right? Again, what's a good way around this while making it look not-so-obvious (in which you see a different floor texture that doesn't match up with the rest of its surrounding textures)?

Speaking of tutti-frutti, I *think* that's a problem I'm having with another staircase in the same map. I'm using the STAIRTOP texture and every few steps seem to have this effect. Here's a screenshot. What's the best way to approach this?

peach freak said:

The error you're hinting at would be the tutti-frutti one, right?

Yes.

peach freak said:

Also, if I made it a 64x128 texture and tried to make it a middle texture on a 2 sided line (and the surrounding sectors are 64 units tall), wouldn't the bottom half of the texture (the non-vent part) "impale" through the floor? I was having this problem earlier, I believe, which is why I made the little passage 64 units tall.

Yes, but this only occurs when the sector on each side of the middle texture have the same properties. You can get around this by differing the properties even slightly. I find bumping the light level on one side to be sufficient for this task.

peach freak said:

EDIT: I *think* I figured out when textures "impale" through the floor. A middle texture that's offset vertically downwards will only impale through the floor if the surrounding floor textures are all of the same, right? Again, what's a good way around this while making it look not-so-obvious (in which you see a different floor texture that doesn't match up with the rest of its surrounding textures)?

Edit ninja ahoy! Yes, you got it. Having the light levels differ by one unit will work, but not be noticeable.

peach freak said:

Speaking of tutti-frutti, I *think* that's a problem I'm having with another staircase in the same map. I'm using the STAIRTOP texture and every few steps seem to have this effect. Here's a screenshot. What's the best way to approach this?

You're aware textures tile, of course, so the best approach is to make sure that short ones don't tile vertically. For your stairs, since you only have so much visible vertically, you could leave off the offsets and "upper unpeg" them all. Upper and lower unpegging stuff will really speed up your texturing. You don't have to assign an offset to every single sidedef, just use the upper/lower unpeg flags to have textures anchored from the top/bottom. Take note that lower unpegging is a bit different from upper unpegging. I believe it takes into account the sector heights, so it's not literally "anchor this texture to the floor".

peach freak said:

Wow, those RAIL textures are awesome! Thanks!

You're welcome. Standard resource usage rules apply - acknowledge the creator or burn in hell. ;-)

How hard are these to align? Look like it'd be a pain and time-consuming.

Not too bad. They're designed for steps that are 16 points deep by 8 points high and being angled means vertical alignment is quick and easy once the horizontal alignment is correct.

Man, to think that there may have been other custom textures I may have wanted in this map. Now I forgot, lol.

I might be able to help you with some if you remember them later.

And I imagine the creator is very much yourself?

Heh, wait until you see the map in full. It's assigned to MAP31, so there is a secret exit tied to it too. And it's based on the entire first Resident Evil game, so you'd get a hefty headstart if you know the game and played through it.

peach freak said:

And I imagine the creator is very much yourself?

With some assistance from Adrian Carmack and/or Kevin Cloud. :-)

EarthQuake said:

Extract each patch graphic of the texture (from doom2.wad), assemble them in something like MSPaint

Before Gez comes here: Instead of using this clumsy method, open the wad with Slade3, open texture editor, select the textures, Texture -> Export Texture, Convert. You'll find the resulting patches in the wad between TX_START and TX_END markers.

Oh nice, I wasn't aware Slade3 was capable of that! Thanks for the tip.

Hey GreyGhost, I was playing through my map to ensure everything was working again, and some of the textures and flats I wanted came to mind.

Do you think you have textures and flats for kitchen utilities, such as fridges/freezers, sinks, ovens, and stove tops (the last one would obviously be a flat/floor texture)?

There is a kitchen somewhere in my map, as you probably figured out.

Don't have any whitegoods at hand but I'll have a shot at making some. Could you give me a sneak peek at the kitchen so I'll have some idea of their dimensions?

GreyGhost said:

Don't have any whitegoods at hand but I'll have a shot at making some. Could you give me a sneak peek at the kitchen so I'll have some idea of their dimensions?

Sorry that I took a couple of days to get back at this topic, but the room is about 384x384ish. The room height is 128, except for some of the features in the room.





The middle thing is my bad attempt at a stove with Doom II flats, and, well um, yeah....this room could use a graphical touchup...