how to use SKIPS and HINTS on opened, outdoor maps?

pasta masta

L1: Registered
Nov 9, 2017
12
2
yes skip and hints, areaportals for optimize tf2 maps tool

and i can't understand how to use skip and hint are work on opened maps
(sujin, upward..etc)

however, almost guideline saying for narrow area and indoors
 
Last edited:

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
aa
Nov 14, 2009
4,694
2,579
The thing about Upward is that it's a lot less open than it looks. Let's look at it from BLU's perspective. To your left, your view is mostly blocked by all the buildings in the middle. On your right, a sheer cliff face with almost nothing but empty open space beyond it. So most of what's rendering is up ahead. The map is essentially a hallway that spirals around.

There are a lot of hint brushes, and as usual I don't really know what most of them do, but there are a few important ones: the ones that stretch across the entire map and split it up into invisible, horizontal "floors". These prevent the game from rendering what's on the other side of the high walls. Here's an illustration:

err5n3K.png


The solid lines are the walls, and the dotted lines are the edges of the hint brushes. You can draw a straight line from that pink zone up into all of the white slices, but that's OK because it's up in the air and there's hardly anything to see there. But in order to see from pink to yellow, or green, or blue, you'd have to draw a line that curves or bends back down again. The game knows that seeing doesn't work that way, so it doesn't render anything in the other colored squares.
 

Da Spud Lord

Occasionally I make maps
aa
Mar 23, 2017
1,339
994
Not all your outdoor skip brushes have to be horizontal, either. Like Crash said, outdoors areas can be thought of as rooms, with the walls being made up of cliff faces and skybox brushes instead of wood and brick. Take a look at the images at the bottom of this guide. You can quite easily create "walls" that will block visibility in outdoor areas using large, inaccessible buildings or tall cliff faces, in which case you can position hint brushes the same way you would for indoor areas without sacrificing the natural look of your outdoor area. For example, for the second screenshot from the aforementioned guide, this blue line would make a good place for a hint brush:
upload_2019-8-30_15-31-2.png