Flickering brush

[spirit]

I've got a strange flickering brush in my Quake II map, hope someone in here knows what to do about it. It looks a bit like z-fighting (which it definitely is not) and is hard to show on screenshots because you have to look at the sport and move a bit to really notice it in-game. I'll it try anyways, but if you have the time to look at the issue in-game, the map can be found at my website (it appears in both the old quake2 version and the new quake2world version).

Here's the spot in my map resurrection that I'm talking about. You can only see the flickering from below though, so the next images are taken from the lower level, looking up towards the brush.



Here is the flickering brush, hard to spot on a static image as I mentioned. I'll explain what you are looking at above the next screenshot.


Ok, the brushes are marked in red. The pink area is the flickering part. Note that the clang-texture seems to be applied to the right brush in the whole flickering area (marked in pink) though it is not. The flickering is worst in the yellow area and looks like z-fighting there.


Here is the same spot in the editor, showing the brushes.


I tried deleting the brush and replacing it with a new one, but the new brush shows the same behaviour as soon as I put it in that place and shape. If I move that brush a few units away, the behaviour stops but reappears when I move it back. I've asked a few people about this but noone could help so far, hope someone in here knows what to do about it.

[jaydolan]

The actual problem is one of probably several bugs in Quake2's surface winding code. There are a couple ways to work around these kinds of bugs:

1) Move the entire level a few units (you can stay on the grid -- i.e. move the whole map 64u on both x and y).

2) Rearrange your brushwork in that area. Either break the problem brush into two brushes, or just fill that catwalk with different brushwork altogether.

Hope this helps,

[spirit]

Hm, the map has > 2200 brushes and when I select all of them and try to move them, nothing happens -- maybe my machine is too crappy or radiant sucks, dunno. I'll try moving them with some lines of perl I guess...

Rearranging the brushwork didn't impress the flickering spot at all.

[grieve[Q2C]]

some vis problem .... use strategik hintbrushes to rearrange the whole area for the vis compiler

if nothing els6e helps make the problem brush a func-wall



map looks awesome,btw

[spirit]

Hm, I fixed this, but it still feels strange.

I had the same problem in another spot. I fixed one of the spots by removing multiple brushes and replacing them by a single one:

(this is the spot mentioned in the original post)


..and the other one by doing the opposite (splitting a single brush in 2):

(this is the second spot, the flickering was in the yellow area and I split the bridge in the middle as you can see)


Whatever. Thanks for all suggestions.

[Whirlingdervish]

I love trying to fix stuff like that once you've run the first full build, to see how the lights came out..

I actually had one map in progress where you could shoot a solid brush with rockets and they would just vanish into it without an explosion or a trace..
Took me days of fiddling around with it until the strange behavior ceased.

[spirit]

Jul 9, 2008 17:21:32 GMT -5 Whirlingdervish said:

Took me days of fiddling around with it until the strange behavior ceased.

These issues leave a bitter taste. I'd really like to know what causes them.