InsideQC Forums

i have created some entities for use as environment decoration.

that seem to disappear when at the edges of the screen or when viewed from certain angles/positions.

below is a screenshot showing what it should look like.


and a few steps forward and it disappears.


**the red is the entity bbox
i am using darkplaces

i thought i had fixed it. but the problem has come up again.


has anybody experienced this.

pics are too tiny, try imageshack or photobucket

heres a video of the problem should show you what i mean.
engine is darkplaces

http://rapidshare.com/files/385167560/d ... y.avi.html

x264 avi format

Interesting. I'd say it's a DP bug.

Maybe (this mean I don't have idea):

The engine calculate that the object is not visible, so is not send to the clientside.

So you either break it in different parts, make it a bsp, or force it to be visible everywhere, or stuff like that.

it has happened to a couple of models.

the boat did have it happen when i first created it. but i dont know what i did to fix it. and at one point the 'dock'/'pier' did not have it happen. and then after a seamingly minimal change and another export it happened again. so now i dont know what the conditions are that cause it. but i had a feeling that it had something to do with normals. but after going over the entire model i couldnt find any problems this time around.

ill try using the latest autobuild of dp. and see how it goes.

i haven't inspected the pics or the video but it could be that there are 2 or more triangles in the model that are in the same locations, which can cause wierd things to happen. Be sure to inspect the model in a modeling program like max and make sure there arent multiple vertices and faces overlapping. If it is brush work, then check in the mapping program.

good luck

still cant seem to work it out. i couldnt find any overlapping tris. but i did have a couple of oddities when i created it..

im using blender. and have moved away from max but ill check it out in it.

has anyone 'anywhere' experienced this? it seems a bit strange since its a fairly simple object. im going with the idea that overlapping or strange geometry is causing it like st3ady suggested

AFAIK bad model geometry wold result in tris flickering/disappearing, not the whole model. Looks like the engine sometimes miscalculates the entity size and then remove it from the PVS.

As a test you could try loading the map in a different engine and see if the problem occurs there. DirectQ has a handy sv_novis cvar which you can set to 1 to cause the server to send all entities to the client irrespective of whether they're in the PVS. Run it as a listen server and connect a DP client and you should then get a very good feel for whether the problem is a client-side or server-side one, as well as whether it's a DP bug or a model bug (or even an inherited GLQuake bug, although I would doubt that with DP as it's code is so different).