About Zhlt 2.5.3

Infinity

<div class="IPBDescription">subdivide...</div> since the subdivide value can be increased to 512, wouldnt that effectively lower the r_speeds in open areas/hallways ?

since increasing the subdivide value can cause problems in software mode, there wont be any problems doing it with NS

NerdIII

If software mode is no longer supported in 1.1, yes, then you can do it. I do it on outdoor maps and it works great. Well, there are still some unnessecary cuts at every angled geometry, else it reduces the faces quite a bit.

Infinity

would be much better if the compile tools didnt subdivide at all and the hl engine supported that :/

Shadowics

Actually, no it wouldn't be good if they didn't subdivide at all, because that would lead to some very large polygons to draw in some places, which would make the 'drawing things around the corner that you can't actually see and increasing your r-speeds' much much worse. On an outdoor map, where there probably aren't a lot of vis-blockers, increasing the subdivide would reduce the total number of polygons and so reduce the number that would have to be drawn at any one time. On an indoor map increasing the subdivide would reduce the total number of polygons, but that also reduces the number of visleafs, making it so you can see farther around each corner. Which could potientally increase your r-speeds significantly, since increasing the subdivide doesn't affect the w-polys on any detail work you've done.

NerdIII

So what we need is a new texture for brushes to describe areas that should not be subdivided, right?
Somewhat like nosubdivide in zhlt.wad. Or we all go mad, set subdivide to the highest number and add hint textues at every corner *g*
No seriously, it is a problem with HL maps. Remember those Unreal deathmatch maps that were converted to HL in the first years? They were slow as hell because they were mad of a lot of large rooms. There were potential visblockers, but none of them worked for HL. And then there were these large walls with 1x1 texture scale <!--emo&???--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/confused.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='confused.gif'><!--endemo-->
Finally we can only find out if it helps to increase subdivide when we test it on a detailed NS map as they are quite different from the usual Half-Life maps, the entities are displayed another way and the hardware has also evolved in the last 5 years...

KungFuSquirrel

By the way, I do believe -subdivide is fairly broken. Anything more complex than a usual test room and you'll be lucky to get it to compile without errors at 256... and practically never at 512. :-\