Would it at all be possible to have a dynamic TV screen, or is it just a dumb idea?

func_dustmote

L1: Registered
Feb 12, 2013
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Say you have an attack/defense map like Gorge. At the final cap there's some large spytech screens. But instead of displaying a map or something similar on them, it shows what's happening at, say, the first capture point from the view of a security camera. Similar to the cameras and TVs in Gmod. Or possibly like the TVs in Half Life 2, where it shows what's happening in a random box somewhere that you could put whatever you wanted in. Is that possible to have in a TF2 map?
 

henke37

aa
Sep 23, 2011
2,075
515
Nah, the performance impact isn't too big, it's just an additional rendered copy of the world. Put it in a cheap spot to render (like a dedicated box) and the impact won't be big at all. And the monitor might not even need rendering most of the time.
 

Egan

aa
Feb 14, 2010
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I did the skybox thing for one of my surf maps a while back. It's a lot harder to line up than it looks to be, and you sacrifice not having any sky textures in the map at all. So, yes, possible, but very silly.
 

A Boojum Snark

Toraipoddodezain Mazahabado
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Nov 2, 2007
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That's actually very bad for any kind of proper map. Having a sky_camera tells VBSP to not generate any leaves for the "space" the camera is in, so the map would be essentially at a maximum un-optimized state, where everything in the whole map renders at all times. Then all of it rendered... again, in the sky.

A couple years ago we had someone who accidentally did this in a map and it went on for several gamedays because you couldn't see the duplicate world from ingame. However, every time his map was played everyone's ping shot up by a few hundred which finally prompted me to take a closer look since obviously something was really wrong with it.
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
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Nov 14, 2009
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Wait, it made their ping shoot up? That's a weird way for a map to impact performance.
 
Sep 7, 2012
638
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Wait, it made their ping shoot up? That's a weird way for a map to impact performance.

If the server is doing resource-intensive calculations and the client is also doing resource-intensive calculations, it is possible that the processes in charge of the connection between the two would be be given less processing time, causing them to send packets less frequently, giving the impression of higher ping? I don't actually know how computers work so I'm just speculating here.
 

A Boojum Snark

Toraipoddodezain Mazahabado
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Nov 2, 2007
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It is weird, but that is what happened. My educated guess at the cause was that the netcode uses the PVS (potentially visible set (of leaves)) in a similar manner as the rendering component does. If Bob and John are outside each others' PVS, the netcode does not need to inform them of the other person's location and activity as often because they will have little relevance to each other.
You can see this effect in some games/mods that show players on a minimap. People far away will jump around the map in intervals as opposed to smoothly the way a nearby player does.

So... with the entire map in the PVS, all 24 players would have had to be kept up to date on the whereabouts of all 23 others in "immediate" terms. (and then doubled by the skybox? not sure if that would be handled all clientside)