The Thin Red Line

[Walt]

In Serious Editor, oftentimes with stairs and other such entities, when you add new rooms to the worldbase or entities it causes corners of polygons to show through the texture or rip. If you do not understand what I'm talking about please observe this screenshot:

http://www.nilspack.com/redlines.gif

Does anyone know of any remedies to the situation or preventions? Help appreciated.

[The friendly newbie]

I don't think anything rips (me has that problem too)
Once ingame the line'll be gone

[Walt]

alright good. I did manage, however, to reconstruct the room without many lines. It's kinda weird though, I used less polygons and such but for some reason when Ratboy rigged it he got better framerates. Whatever.

Thanks for the the pointer, I didn't realize they'd dissipiate ingame.

[Bwian]

Nils, the problem is more visible when you look across a flat polygon at eye level (say, in a stairway, the ones at eye level will have this effect, and others won't). It's all to do with the accuracy, or lack thereof, of your video card's 2d representation of a plane in 3d. What's basically happening is the jaggies from one polygon aren't being displayed in the same fashion as the jaggies from another, and in the spots where they don't overlap or meet, you're seeing through to the background (the red would be replaced by your background, btw, in-game). FSAA is one of the only things that gets rid of the problem, apart from just increasing your resolution, since both are more accurate than normal.

[pompey]

is this partly solved by using room sizes the computer likes, i.e. power of 2 values. does this help it fit it all together?

[LSD]

This problem with video card accuracy occurs in just about all game engines to some extent. The reason you dont see it in games like Quake and Unreal is cause they draw the void with a hall of mirrors effect, thus the holes have the pixels around them blended into them, and you dont see them. In Sam, the skybox is drawn in the void, so if you have a brightly colored skybox they'll still show up, and they'll show in the distance.

[Bwian]

Well damn LSD, I always heard that it was less visible in the others, but never heard why. That makes perfect sense

[Liquid Morphine]

Best way to ged rid of it is using a trick, as it doesn't take the problem away, it just makes it less visable.

Set all world background colors to black (they are red by default) now when such a crack appears, it will show the black background and not the red colour, in most cases that is less obtrusive.

Another solution is to place a giant box (set to room) around your whole map and leave it unlit. Again, looking through such a crack you see the box and it will be less obtrusive than the red colour.

Actually, this comes down to about the same thing as what LSD just said ;)

Matthew
www.liquidmorphine.com

(Edited by Liquid Morphine at 1:19 pm on Oct. 11, 2001)