Stripping down the BSP bitm/shad/?

[CaptainPoopface]

I have noticed in some people's mods that the base map in Entity's BSP viewer is completely stripped of textures and visual details. Everything looks covered with a white sheet. This substantially reduces the BSP viewer's load time and improves performance on my computer. It's a few steps toward reducing the agony. How is it done? I've checked the mode tags for nulled shaders, the shader tags for nulled bitms, and the bitm tags for nulled references. I don't see anything conspicuously different in the scenario or sbsp tags between the clean base map and the modded maps.

Edit: I'm referring to mods that entirely disregard the base map geography and impose their own, such as big floating race tracks (don't reach for your shotgun - I am NOT making a race track).

Edit 2: I don't mean altering collision or removing the BSP. THIS is what I mean.

Download the patch for e.g. Ace Space Race by The-Master, then load the map in the BSP Viewer, and you'll see the above.

For now, I suppose I can just use a mod that has done this as the base map and remove everything the modder added, but I don't feel so proud to do that. It would be helpful if I could make a clean, stripped Containment to use as a base map for future mods. I will post a patch for it if I figure it out, or if someone else figures it out and tells me.

[hoho5000]

It would be really nice if there was some option to increase performance. For some reason if I'm viewing large maps, the bsp viewer runs at less than 1 fps on my desktop, which has a pentium 4 3 Ghz processor, 1.5 GB of ram, 300 GB of HD space, and a 128 MB video. On my laptop though, on those large bsps, It runs significantly better. Why is this?

[DJ_Gnomey]

It would be really nice if there was some option to increase performance. For some reason if I'm viewing large maps, the bsp viewer runs at less than 1 fps on my desktop, which has a Pentium 4 3 Ghz processor, 1.5 GB of ram, 300 GB of HD space, and a 128 MB video. On my laptop though, on those large bsps, It runs significantly better. Why is this?

Doesn't mean shit about your processor if it isn't Pentium 4 and up. I believe you have a Celeron processor which has to be like the most annoying two bit processor ever amde for a computer running Windows.....

Add more RAM and get a new video card if you ever want to be involved in this sort of game design/modifications so you can actually run all visualizations smoothly.


As for the removing of the BSP, you are looking in the absolute wrong places if you want all the collision removed too. If you want to collision removed, just go into one of the any BSP tools out there (can't think of any names, just woke up) and click the "remove bsp" button.

[OwnZ joO]

He said he wanted simple shaders to make it run better in the bsp viewer. I don't know the answer, but if you want to remove the bsp all together like DJ said, you want BSP tools by high6. Most of the bsp viewing performance is on your graphics card, system ram helps a little bit, but not that much for my computer.

[StalkingGrunt911]

I believe there is a shader something that ends with grey and I'm pretty sure it has something to do with that. I thought Ace Space Race had the BSP invisible or null out since it was a racetrack.

[OwnZ joO]

I didn't look at that picture in your first post before, are you sure that's not just a 3ds Max render of the bsp model? I don't do renders much or look at them, but that seems like what it would look like. If you really wanted to do something like that you could duplicate a shader and one of it's bitmaps. Then edit the bitmap to be just one simple color. Then extract the sbsp meta(nonrecursive), to save the dependency settings, then you could swap all of the shaders to your edited one(use a mass dependency swapper).

[smokey]

You see, I don't think that's what it is, unfortunately.

Could I please have a link to that map? I'm going to check it out, and see if I can help you out a bit .

[CaptainPoopface]

I didn't look at that picture in your first post before, are you sure that's not just a 3ds Max render of the bsp model?

It's a screenshot of the BSP Viewer for Ace Space Race.

As I said, nothing looks out of the ordinary in terms of bitmaps and shaders. Each model has its default shaders, and the shaders have their default bitmaps, as near as I can tell at a glance (at the idents).

A mass dependency swap does sound plausible, although I don't know which dependencies would be swapped/nulled. And the only program I have that batch processes dependency swaps is too amateurish for me trust it.

For now, I'll use a mod that has already done this as the base map, and give credit if I release it. I've seen the same stripped BSP in Headshotmasta's excellent mod called Citadel, from Killtrocity. It is a dramatic performance boost for BSP Viewer on my old busted machine. My mouse cursor no longer refreshes once every 2 seconds, and objects move very soon after I press the keys, not 10 seconds later, and sometimes they even go in the direction I want them to.

There is another very unusual, attractive feature to Ace Space Race: It has 300+ slots in the mach placement palette. There are definitely not 300+ machs on Containment, and I thought 99 was the limit of chunk cloning. How did he do it? This should be discussed in another thread, however. I know a few people have posted about the chunk cloning limit, and I've been curious about it myself. Someone has the knowledge... I haven't seen The-Master posting lately though.

Ace Space Race can be found in the Serenity Repository (a nice piece of work, the SR) here on halomods.