null texture Created 20 years ago2004-03-09 18:43:12 UTC by high_voltage

I'm making a fairly complex outdoor map, such that it sadly has to have a skybox hollowed all around it, but if i use the ZHLT null texture on all the faces that aren't seen will that improve the compile time etc?

Where do I get the null texture?

yes, it should help.

Null texture is in ZHLT.wad

There are very very few cases where a hollowed skybox should be put around the whole map (e.g. my starwars maps), why on earth do you need it for an outdoors map?

Go to the example map Vault, both Kol and I have posted NULL stuff.
Adding NULL to every face the player will not see will not automatically reduce the compile time...
Actually I will go as far to say that it will have very little effect on the compile time as you are only removing a few map lit faces.
What it might do is reduce the r_speeds of the map, but there is no guarantee of that.
If the faces that are not seen are at the bottom of the map, then you don't need a sky box.

this map is the rough shape of a road going through a mountain cutting, so i cant just put up 4 walls and a roof of sky. My notion was that the null texture would mean that light calculations would not be carried out on those faces on the unseen parts of the road structure, saving compile time (if that's how it works)

You already have two walls of mountain?
Why not cap that and the ends, no need for NULL trickery then.

But the walls are only about 160-200 units high and it goes through several corners, ergo sky brushes will not fit. I'm assuming that sky cannot be lots of brushes all grouped together to make concave shapes, right?

Wrong. Sky can be any brush (or set of brushes) that is on the outer edge of your map.

you should try to avoid concave brushes wherever possible, or you can get some bad physical/visual clipping problems

sky is a brush in maps, not a brush in game and does not count towards wpoly - its drawn like a sprite (sort of) so it hits the fps - not the polygons.

and the subdiv. size is 240, so its sort of silly making walls just 200 - when you have another 40 units to spare

... so if you have a 256 high wall, and reduce it to 240, your r_speeds will be reduced by half

erm..i'll just keep messing around until something happens