Black and white textured brushes?

seth

aa
May 31, 2013
1,019
851
I recently decompiled a few official maps to study and I came across some things I can't explain. There are these big brushes than span an entire area, practically sealing them, textured in toolsblack or a fake skybox white. I've seen them in King and Barnblitz. At first I thought they were the buddy brushes to an areaportalwindow because there are also areaportal textured brushes in the same spot as them, but they don't appear to be tied to a func_areaportalwindow. Maybe I'm just selecting them wrong but I use the select tool to select them and alt-enter to go into object properties. No matter if I'm in group, object, or solid select mode the object properties only show that it's a solid with 6 faces and that it's in the areaportal visgroup. Here's what it looks like in Hammer, King and Barnblitz respectively.

65824d7d8a.jpg

d2a8e3abb2.jpg
 

Idolon

they/them
aa
Feb 7, 2008
2,105
6,106
func_areaportalwindow is just an areaportal that will automatically close once the camera is a certain distance away.
 

seth

aa
May 31, 2013
1,019
851
I know what they are and how to use them, I'm just confused because they don't actually appear to be areaportalwindows. In the instance of koth_king, there is a named func_brush textured in toolsblack with a brush textured in areaportal occupying the same space, which is the setup for an areaportalwindow. However, the brush with areaportal texturing doesn't actually appear to be tied to any entity. It's just a brush textured with areaportal, it must be a func_areaportalwindow with the fade-out brush being the func_brush behind it. I don't know if I'm selecting wrong or something, but the properties of the areaportal brush show it as nothing more than a world brush, not a func_areaportalwindow like it needs to be.
 

wareya

L420: High Member
Jun 17, 2012
493
191
they might've had areaportalwindows and then disabled them later
 

xzzy

aa
Jan 30, 2010
815
531
Decompiles can fail to extract the areaportals properly.. I wouldn't trust any optimization brushes you find in there.

If you want an illustration of the differences, try decompiling badlands and comparing the resulting vmf to the vmf that comes in the sourcesdk_content folder.
 

A Boojum Snark

Toraipoddodezain Mazahabado
aa
Nov 2, 2007
4,775
7,669
They are the APW brushes. As said, decompilers don't handle area portals properly but you can confirm it by looking at the entity data in the BSP itself and dev commands ingame.
 

seth

aa
May 31, 2013
1,019
851
So when I made the original post, I didn't have access to Hammer so I couldn't check some things I wanted to. I had some time now so I poked about and found out a couple things.

I checked all of the SDK maps and none appear to have areaportalwindows at all. Not surprising I guess.

Barnblitz doesn't actually have areaportalwindows either. Those white brushes are using the sky_fake_white texture. I tried looking for it in the skybox folder, but it's not there. I assume then that it's an HL2 texture, but there's practically nothing in my HL2 folder because it's not installed on the partition I have Hammer in. Can anyone tell me where I might find it? I know HL2 source content is packed with Hammer/SFM, but I don't know where I can actually find it.

The texture itself I suppose is just a transparent one that maybe fades out the closer you get to it? I'd just like to know for sure, as that kind of thing might be pretty useful for a fog supplement.
 
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seth

aa
May 31, 2013
1,019
851
pretty sure koth_harvest uses areaportal windows (they are visible from ingame).

Well that map isn't an SDK, so it's impossible to check since VMEX breaks these things. I didn't mean to say no other official maps have them, just the SDK's don't.

It is part of the TF2 install. common\Team Fortress 2\hl2

Yeah that folder just has a small collection of random stuff in it for me, no content packs anywhere.
 

A Boojum Snark

Toraipoddodezain Mazahabado
aa
Nov 2, 2007
4,775
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seth

aa
May 31, 2013
1,019
851
I... I have no idea. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/98931/pics/hl2folder.PNG
That is in fact where sky_fake_white lives... and I do have HL2 installed but those VPKs are duplicated over in that install... they aren't shared like the GCFs were.
Do HL2 materials even show up in your Hammer?

Yes, I think all the models and textures from HL2 show up in Hammer, but there's practically nothing in my HL2 folder, just a few random things. I don't have access to my computer to check exactly what I have right now, but I'm positive I have no .vpk's.
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
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Nov 14, 2009
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The texture itself I suppose is just a transparent one that maybe fades out the closer you get to it? I'd just like to know for sure, as that kind of thing might be pretty useful for a fog supplement.
No. That's entirely possible, of course, but it makes more sense to control the fades directly from the entity. Which is how it works: you tell it how close players have to get before it fades out, leaving you with a perfectly normal window.

I have no idea what sky_fake_white is, but it might be on the blacklist. Certain materials that aren't meant to be used in Hammer are barred from appearing in the material browser. It's not a perfect list; some model textures sometimes slip through, some perfectly usable ones don't show up, and there are a couple normal maps in the brick folder for some reason as of the Two Cities update. But they still render in Hammer if you type or copy-paste the path into the face editor manually.