Abyss Darkness illusion

[zornor]

Eh, shit; turns out it WAS working all along... but thanks to how the map compiled, it was really unnoticable. Thought they'd all overlap, but it made like a big block of ~12.5% opaque black.

As for any other ways of making a cool death pit, i'm sure they exist, I just can't be bothered finding em

 

[What Is Schwa]

I gave the pit a try. For a better effect I used the vertex tool to select the inner four vertices of the pit and used alt-e to bring them in about .7 This gives the illusion of depth without it actually being deep. I also just used the tools black texture, not the block light one.

 

[Icarus]

Try using func_smokevolume. Observatory and Steel both use it for their pits.

 

[zornor]

my FPS already drops from 300 (and this is when I wasn't bothered to disconnect and set fps_max to 9999!) to ~140 whenever I look at the func_illusionary pit so I don't know if it's a great idea to do another performance killer like smoke, FPS-wise.

 

[zornor]

well this was a goddamn short-lived victory. I hate you Hammer! ;_;

This happens whenever i compile. It looks fine in hammer but...

...yeah.

Seems to happen (rarely) whenever I use vertex editing or clipping tool

 

[Icarus]

does alt+p turn up anything?

 

[zornor]

nope, all i'm getting is a whole bunch of crap like "info_overlay has unused keyvalue "angles""

 

[Apom]

This happened to me a couple of times when toying with non-square brushes. Delete the offending brush and create a new one (yeah, it's really annoying).

 

[Vigilante212]

Yea same here just do what apom said. And always make sure that the brushes end on the grid.

 

[Sgt Frag]

I bet that one vert that end sup out of whack is off the grid by a hair.

Zoom in real close. But just recreating the brush is probably easier.

 

[Rexy]

Just try being as regular as you can with your brushes. As soon as they become complicated, that's when you start running into problems like that. If you can't get a brush shape you want, step back, examine your options, and see if there's a better (or simpler) solution to how you build the brushes in your map.

 

[Vigilante212]

I just want to say I tried the abyss technique on my map today. I wanted my rocket to facde into blackness above. It worked flawlessly, Didnt harm my FPS at all I did it with 12 func_illusionary the first six I used 20 increments on the last 6 I used 40 on, and then the light block in the middle.

 

[LLamaBoy]

I'm currently playing around with this method and I've found that if you use a white texture, such as lights/white, you can then use the "rendercolor" (FX Color) property to shade the brush any colour you like, meaning you're not just limited to black for your bottomless needs.

 

[Earl]

I like to make my bottomless pits ridiculously deep. Like 6,000-10,0000 units. If you stretch the textures and keep it simple, it doesnt affect performance much at all. You don't have to worry about creating the illusion of black, and it's fun watching your ragdoll fall for 15 seconds after the kill trigger kills you.

 

[YM]

There is an overlay texture thats called blackgradient or something like that. give that a shot for deep pits

 

[Howling]

I've had another problem with the func_illusionary technique. See the screencap.

A Block Light brush still is rendered btw. It also cuts other brushes. So that one's not FPS friendly, unless you use the nodraw tool texture on other faces.

 

[Vigilante212]

odd, I personlly got rid of the block light brush it was doing odd things.

 

[Howling]

odd, I personlly got rid of the block light brush it was doing odd things.

Yes. The best way seems to be to simply use a blackfade overlay. Does exactly what one wants.