Enable/Disable displacement brushes?

CoolJosh3k

L1: Registered
Feb 4, 2010
3
0
Is there any way to have a displacement in your map, that is enabled upon an entity's output?

In my case, I want to have a sheet of ice using displacements. The sheet of ice only shows up when a Logic_Branch_Listener outputs an enable signal.

I can do this without displacements easy enough, but how can I make this work with displacements?

Any help is appreciated.
 

Ælement

Comfortably mediocre
aa
Dec 21, 2010
1,481
1,616
I don't think displacements are anywhere as dynamic as valve intended them to be currently, and this is an example of something i don't believe can be done directly at the moment.

What you could do, probably, would be to convert the displacement to a model using propper. This model should be easy to disable/enable.

Just be aware that when you paste your displacement into an empty map to convert it, you'll need to have a normal brush in there as well, as compiling with only displacements will cause propper to crash.
 
Last edited:

CoolJosh3k

L1: Registered
Feb 4, 2010
3
0
This would certainly work as a solution, but won't having a custom model (around 10k hu^2) be of a rather large file size?
 

Ælement

Comfortably mediocre
aa
Dec 21, 2010
1,481
1,616
Models are rather heavy, yes, but i don't think a simple displacement could ever be very heavy when turned into a model. There are quite few triangles in a displacement after all.

We could look at Rexy's forklift to better grasp the size of models. The forklift is definitely much more complex than a displacement, yet it only weights about 1.5 mb.

A lot of people pack lots of much more complex models into their maps without anyone having any troubles. An example could be my joke map, koth nippletwister, which had custom trees, fish, dogbread and three recompiled bioshock models included.
 

EArkham

Necromancer
aa
Aug 14, 2009
1,625
2,773
Most of the download size in a model is the texture anyway. SMDs and obj files are text readable lists of coordinates, and a mdl is just a compiled engine-ready version with additional behaviour settings from the qc file.

10k square HU is huge though -- why do you need to disable/enable something of that size? There may be a simpler solution.

Plus with a model of that size, you'd probably run into lighting and collision issues, even with correct light settings and a good physics model. One of the reasons why large props (such as airplanes) are actually broken up into several smaller sections.