Journal #8788

Hey, this looks relevant to my interests, especially since I've started working on Sledge again. I will watch it when I have some spare time I'm at work. Thanks!

Edit: Interesting watch. The ideas of creating geometry in Unreal/3DS are really cool. Will have to keep that in mind for Sledge!

If you can make subtractive geometry work for sledge i think I'll fly to Australia and give you a hug

i have heard countless times of people saying how horrible geometry is in unreal compared to hammer

Perhaps the simpler nature of additive brush building might appeal to a beginner, but gain any amount of experience and the flexibility of subtractive geometry becomes very apparent. Only having to manage the faces of geometry that will actually exist/be visible in your level, much faster iteration time as well as readability of your levels since you don't have to see all the extra geometry (in your 2d views) that won't exist in the final level and is not relevant.

I can't speak to final performance in the compiled BSP as I am not technically privy to what goes on under the hood, but at least for the source map file you will see significantly reduced filesizes.
Consider a simple room: In subtractive, it's 8 vertices with 6 faces, corresponding to only the vertices and connecting faces that make up the inside (and relevant portion) of the room.
In additive, it's 48 vertices with 36 faces, which corresponds to the inside vertices and faces of the room, as well as all of the outer faces and vertices of the 6 boxes that make up the room.
That is 6 times the information, most of which contains wasted UV space, texture and position data, as well as any other information that can be mapped to the unnecessary vertices and faces within hammer itself.

Eh, the only way (that I can think of) to implement a subtractive -> bsp process would be to carve, so it's probably never happening for GS/Source editing.

@Crollo
And... what about texture alignment? I played Unreal yesterday and everything looked so seamed on the edges of cliffs and terrain.

Finally got round to watching this - very interesting. Thanks for sharing!