Seeing between rooms

[minrose]

First off, the wiki has this to say:

Interior based levels have explicit connections between rooms, unlike exteriors where there is an implicit connection between two neighboring chunks. For this reason the connectivity must be set up by the artists. This should be done through planning and iteration as it will affect the streaming and performance of the level in the game.

If you select a room, you will see that that room appears highlighted in red. The Room Properties window can be brought up by pressing the Room Properties button. This behavior can be disabled by unchecking the Highlight visible rooms checkbox. All of the rooms that are visible to this room show up in green. You will see the list of these rooms show up in the Visible Rooms list in the picture above.

The ideal way to generate this visibility information is to press the button called “Generate Visibility Graph”. This will take a little bit of time, so sit back after you press it and be patient. What it does is take a render of each room in the level and generate a list of all rooms that can be seen from it.

NOTE: You must have generated pathfinding data for the level before you generate the visibility info, as it uses the pathing points in this process.

Of course this can be tweaked manually afterwards using the add and remove buttons. However if you ever press the Generate button again it will wipe out all manual changes.

The visibility system is used for streaming as well as the fog of war system, and determining what rooms are visible to the player depending on his/her current room. There is one other factor however to this, the connectivity system, which is detailed next.

The Room Connectivity System is necessary because there are things that can block visibility from one room to another. For instance if I’m looking up a hallway and I can see 3 rooms in the distance, but then I close the door in front of me, the game needs a way to know that those rooms are now invisible. This is where this system comes in.

The room connectivity system can be visualized by the other checkbox under the Connected Rooms list in the Rooms properties window.

Notice that the rooms connected to the current room show up in brown. This is a reminder that you are looking at connectivity and not visibility. As you can see only the rooms that are DIRECTLY connected to the selected room should be in this list. This has to built up manually, by clicking add and then clicking on the rooms that are connected to it. The add button in this case is more of a node, click it, then click the rooms you want to add, then you have to click it again to turn it off. This was done to make adding all the rooms faster.

 

This doesn't appear to work for me.

 

I have two rooms in a .lvl file. They are butted up against one another. When I view pathing there are nice green dots leading from one room to the next.

 

http://i48.tinypic.com/n4hbv9.jpg

 

Then I generate the visibility graph (r-click room in left panel > Pathing > Generate Visibility Graph) for each room, but it doesn't seem to do much.

 

Once I get into a module using this level transitioning in works fine.

 

The first room is well lit, the animated fire in the fireplace crackles along happily...

 

Except when I look out the door into the next room I see... sky.

 

Stepping through that door loads the next room and then everything is just fine, but I shouldn't have to step through the door to see into the room.

 

 

I can't find anything in the wiki on manually handling the nodes so I'm kind of stuck at this point.

 

Anyone else having issues with this?

[minrose]

Ah well, was going to recreate this anyhow. I suspect I'll be better off building multi-section houses as one 'room' and using group folders to delineate them for now.

 

If anyone has an idea I'd still be interested.