compile is taking too long

Billo

aa
Feb 8, 2016
920
397
i am compiling my map with normal normal normal everything and it is taking more that 5 and half hours
what should i do to reduce the time?
 

worMatty

Repacking Evangelist
aa
Jul 22, 2014
1,257
999
When your compile takes a silly amount of time, it is likely the VVIS step that is working the longest. VVIS takes every corner of every vis portal (the 'sides' of a visleaf), and checks to see which corners of every other portal it can see. Naturally, if you have a lot of places where lots of portals can see other portals, it is going to take a very long time to calculate.

Before you start to optimise your map, you should perform a VBSP-only compile, with no VVIS or VRAD steps. The VBSP step creates the vis portals that VVIS calculates, and will take a few seconds even on very large and detailed maps. When it's complete, open the map's portal file, using the option in Hammer's menu. This will display all of the vis portals as blue lines in Hammer's 3D viewport. Look for places where there are too many vis portals, and for open spaces where a lot of vis portals can see each other (for example, the sky over your buildings). Use the methods in the web site that iiboharz linked to reduce them and limit visibility between them.

If you have an oddly-shaped building that is large enough to obscure a player's vision of the things it conceals, and it is causing unavoidable ugly-looking visleaves, don't worry about it too much. The object of vis opt is not to make every visleaf square and large, but to limit what is visible to the player at once.

Hammer's compile console freezes up during compile, so it's hard to see what is going on. If you use a third-party compiler like CompilePalX, the compile progress will be shown in real time.
 

Crash

func_nerd
aa
Mar 1, 2010
3,315
5,499
Is this on the Upward reskin you've been working on? Upward is pretty notorious for long compile times. I know Valve uses some visclusters to help, but you can hurt the map more if you use them wrong.

Edit: I totally mixed you up with someone else, I'm working too much, disregard.
 
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Zeklyn

L2: Junior Member
Jul 30, 2016
80
21
Welcome to my world..

Well patience is the keyword to success (or something like that)
You just have to wait i guess, or optimize it even further
 

Sergis

L666: ])oo]v[
aa
Jul 22, 2009
1,874
1,257
(..) Look for places where there are too many vis portals(..)
gotta be careful here, this runs the risk of creating paranoid mappers

ive seen quite a few times this year people looking at a normal portalfile and thinking its bad just because there is "a lot" of blue lines and its not perfectly squeaky clean

id recommend looking at official map portal files to get an idea what is and what isnt "a lot" in this context and also look for visleaves that are either under 16 hu in any direction or nonorthogonal in shape. this feels to me to be a better advice than just abstract "too many"
 
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