I have no idea what I'm doing wrong here. Everytime set up room markers and portals in the ck they seem to be aligned just fine. But to my surprise when I explore the cell ingame the room markers seem to be misaligned. To be more specific, when I walk through a "portal plane" between room markers one of the room markers disappear leaving a visible empty space behind me.

And when I reopen the cell in CK the room markers seem to be perfectly aligned. I'm really stumped, there must be something I'm doing terribly wrong.

I use snap to reference (so that the new room marker I have created snaps to the former one). I've lost my nerves so completely that I'm willing to abandon using the room markers once and for all. I'm not sure if occlusion planes would be a better way to go around this annoying problem (Haven't really seen any performance difference with or without room markers).

Has anyone else had problems with room markers and have you found some way to align them perfectly?

IMO room markers/portals is a waste of time unless you are making a very long linear dungeon that goes from point a to point b with a couple of turns in between.

if your interior layout is anything but linear, ditch the room markers. i have since used only trigger boxes and scripted enable/disable for the performance heavy objects. i never saw any noticeable improvements from using room markers, but a significant improvement from specifically targeted disables via trigger boxes (up to 10 fps increase from just lighting and fx management alone).

I have been having the same problem. I don't think you (or I) are doing anything wrong. I have a 2 cell dungeon, and cell A is having this problem, but cell B is fine. Cell A also seems to have been hit by the navmesh bug pretty hard, but again cell B seems unaffected. I have been wondering if they are related.
Tonight I was going to delete the navmesh and the roombounds/portals in cell A and redo them all. I'm hoping that helps because cell B was put together pretty easily with the navmesh then roombounds done last. Cell A I went back and reworked some sections after it was finished, so I had to change parts of the navmesh and roombounds. I don't know if this caused it but it's something to try.

Some times "repositioning" the room+portal markers seems to help. There is no visible change in the CK but in game you'll see that there is no "gap" between the rooms. Somehow the when the CK creates the portal marker between the rooms, it seems to be misaligned even though it appears to be perfectly in place. Moving it around with snap to reference on seems to make the portal "fall into place".

I'm having problems snapping the room markers together as well... I ended up using a bigger grid to make the gaps easier to notice but the pieces still don't snap properly. The problem seems to be scaling. I don't know if I'm missing something here, it also looks like it's bound to the grid but it leaves gaps or overlaps the other markers most of the time. Also, linking a portal to two rooms messes things up a bit sometimes (though it's supposed to fix them).

I've resorted to scaling and moving the markers off-grid, and amazingly, it works a lot better, even though it's slower. <- Never do this.

I have a few additional questions about the optimization objects:
- Shouldn't the room marker cull everything else in the cell that's not inside it (or inside the markers that are linked to it with a portal)? Using "tcl" in the game and flying around left a few light objects visible and one normal wall in otherwise non-rendered rooms (as well as some other stuff like water and "epic"-kit objects, but it's probably just their size). The lights and the small wall were in the middle of the markers and everything else similar was culled.

- Occlusion planes. I made a few huge ones to test them, but they didn't seem to cull everything. Overall, they seemed almost random. Do they only work from one side or something? What's the advantage in joining them together?

- Shouldn't multibounds render everything inside the marker, if one of the objects is rendered? Didn't work for me, but I suspect room markers override them somehow?

- How does the size and amount of optimization objects affect the performance? I know you shouldn't make a lot of portals visible to each other etc., but I'm talking about things like enormous occlusion planes to cull absolutely everything from certain points in the map. I have 3 huge rooms in my dungeon now and I'm unsure how to make it work as smoothly as possible.

Once you click 'link portal to room' to merge two roombounds together, the CK will automatically move the roombounds so they are flush with each other. Once you do this step DO NOT MOVE THE ROOMBOUND OR PORTAL!!
The engine just did some calculations to make sure the roombounds are flush together and everything works. If you move/scale the roombounds after that it causes all sorts of problems. What i do is create all the roombounds first, make sure they look good with no gaps, and then i link the rooms together one by one. I rely on the engine to automatically bind the roombounds together and make sure the are no gaps, we humans are really innacurate and bad at doing that sort of thing (our eyes often fool us)

Well, I learned it the hard way, don't move the markers by hand! It may seem to work, but it leads to some bizarre stuff in-game. Mostly random objects from certain rooms rendering for no real reason.

I was playing around with the room markers/portals for hours yesterday and I assure you, linking the portal does not always place the markers properly. The best thing to do is check for errors every time and when you start, check that the first markers are not in a special angle. I had two rooms that were supposed to be perfectly snapped but the portal I placed between them automatically rotated for 0.000007 degrees or something, leading to errors.

I had errors with pretty much all the room markers I had made (after deleting them all and making new ones) and I had to move them around and snap everything individually getting rid of errors one by one. I might be missing something here, but resizing the markers didn't snap to the same grid. Anyway, the biggest problem I had were big markers covering large rooms. They simply wouldn't snap and I had to split them into smaller, joined markers. The size of the other marker or the portal didn't matter, it was the large markers. I suspect they rotate or scale into some weird positions, even though you can't see it and everything seems to snap. A lot like the normal kit objects, when you have to rotate stuff around to make it fit properly sometimes.

Anyway, the occlusion/multibound problems I mentioned in the above post probably have something to do with the room markers being badly placed.


One more question: Is it a bad thing to have joined room markers overlap? If you leave a gap between them, the CK gives error on check, something like "markers are not touching or overlapping". This would suggest it's ok to make them overlap? I tried it, there are no errors and the rooms seem to work in game. The markers aren't overlapping any point with portals, of course.

Bumping the thread, answering some of my own questions and asking more:


The room markers don't override multibounds, but they seem very buggy overall. I've managed to get some work perfectly and others have turned rendering into a chaos. It's probably best not to make the multibounds very big or cover big objects with them, not to mention other multibounds.

One more question: Is it a bad thing to have joined room markers overlap? If you leave a gap between them, the CK gives error on check, something like "markers are not touching or overlapping". This would suggest it's ok to make them overlap? I tried it, there are no errors and the rooms seem to work in game. The markers aren't overlapping any point with portals, of course.

It's ok to have joined room markers overlap. In fact, it seems like it's the only choice, when I tried to join rooms that were formerly joined by a portal, I still got the error saying the rooms aren't touching/overlapping. Not to mention that the vanilla dungeons do this as well. Also, it's the best (the only?) way to rotate the markers, if you have 45 degree doorways etc.

Objects not culling despite of room markers and occlusion objects have something to do with this:

[img]http://users.kymp.net/sierain/renderbug.jpg[/img]

The top image is from my dungeon and the other one is from the vanilla cell "Labyrinthian03". Random objects are rendering in game when flying outside the rooms using "tcl". Why does this happen? The problem I mentioned earlier was exactly this (except worse), and I managed to get rid of it by remaking all the room markers and portals without any errors. However, this occurs again now that 1.6 is out. I made no changes to the dungeon and there are absolutely no errors with the rooms/portals. I even tried starting to make the rooms from scratch again but the same objects keep appearing no matter what. That's when I decided to check some vanilla dungeons if they had the same problem. There was one thing that I could never get rid of, and it's the candle sprites. They also appear in vanilla.

I thought this could be caused by seeing the portals, since there are no walls covering anything in the void, but that doesn't seem to be the case either.

I'm thinking of just letting it be. The dungeon looks perfectly normal when I'm not passing through any walls, everything renders like it should. The problem seems to be much worse in Labyrinthian03, and my has more rooms than it.

Edit:
Seems like some of those errors are caused by objects being too close to the room marker boundaries or other markers. Sometimes. It all seems very random, really. I've tried moving some objects right in the middle of new, clean rooms and they still appear like that. I've managed to make most of the rooms work perfectly now by altering or replacing the markers or the problematic objects themselves. Joined rooms cause some of the problems and work in strange ways overall, resizing or moving them helps sometimes. The best thing to do would be avoiding the markers touching multiple other markers and sharing large areas. Having a room with 3 or more portals is usually a bad thing. Large objects (or water) should be nowhere near the borders of a marker, but then again, sometimes they work perfectly. Stairs, corners and other objects with a lot of "empty space" should be put in safe places.

It's really hard to say exactly, what's causing all this and I'm fairly sure there's some kind of problem with the optimization objects to begin with.

Sorry for the triple post, but there's yet another different problem with these. It's the joined rooms again:


I've got rid of all the problems and my cell now seems to render everything perfectly (except for water but it's just too tough to fix), but there's an issue with one spot, where two room markers are joined. Moving into the area where the markers overlap and facing a certain angle makes the whole screen go black. Not like seeing into the void or the objects disappearing, just pitch black. The direction needs to be pretty much exact for this to happen, I think it's about 90 degrees to the left (the area is in a straight hallway). I also had the same problem in the middle of another room when I added multiple occlusion planes inside 2-sided walls. Moving close to the wall in a certain angle made the screen go black.

Anyway, the joined rooms are the thing I'm confused about. I've tried resizing, rotating and remaking them, but they always have the problem. They sometimes give an error when loading the cell in CK or pressing F5, but not always. I've had similar problems with other joined roombounds (though I never got a black screen), but modifying or remaking the markers has always fixed the issue. However, nothing seems to help with these ones. What am I missing here?

It turns out the screen going black had nothing to do with the markers after all. I had some RGB values set to 0, 0, 0 in my lighting template, which caused the lights to turn completely off in certain spots. I probably hadn't noticed the whole thing if I wasn't using "Night Eye" as my only source of light. Seems like these spots were so dark, that they even overruled the ability.