What are these entities/system shaders?

[IrocJeff]

Under the system shaders there are a few new things I haven't seen in Jedi  Outcast.

 

There is an anti-portal, caulk (acid, water, lava), lightgrid, rainsurf, and weatherzone. 

 

Also under entities I see lightjunior and terrain. 

 

Can anyone explain these to me?

 

 

[mrwonko]

anti-portal is for anti portals.

caulk_acid/water/lava are for acid/water/lava.

rainsurf is for rain surfaces.

weatherzone is for weather zones.

lightjunior is a junior light.

 

Helpful so far?

 

Anti portals are for blocking vis, it's basically the same as putting a caulk brush somewhere except it's not solid. Useful for Vis when working with detail brushes, e.g. inside terrains.

 

The caulk variants are for the invisible sides of liquids, they have the proper volume properties set, but since they may differ in fog color I would recommend you write your own versions with correct fog color when using liquidsd.

 

I'm just guessing with regards to rain surfaces, but I'd say it's for splash effects with weather effects in nonsolid places, e.g. on tree leaves that the player can fall through but that should still have nice splashes on them.

 

Weather zones are also related to the weather system, they're used for the weather zone entities to mark areas of the map that use weather.

 

Junior lights are not used for lightmap calculations, they just affect the light grid which is used for "dynamic" lighting.

 

I don't know about terrain and the lightgrid shader.

[Ramikad]

Antiportal... that's something strange. It basically creates a "hole" in the VIS, but without adding to the bsp size. Works a bit strangely, but works well. The best way to use it is put inside walls, culling everything on both sides when the player is close.

 

Caulk, is self explanatory - from the description, "A System shader designed to 'caulk' or seal a map. In-game, it is a transparent solid texture. It is best applied to all surfaces which a player will be unable to see while in-game." Not sure how it affects in the specific the various materials (acid, water, lava).

 

Lightgrid, I didn't know about this one, but searching it up, "Lightgrid is used when you want to restrict the size of the lightgrid to certain boundaries for performance optimization. Take a space map for example, you may not need lightgrid calculations done in the void where you have no light sources anyway so you would circle a single lightgrid brush around the region that you do want lightgrid to be calculated."

 

Rainsurf, "Surfaces with this texture on them will(should) enable that rain-splatter effect. Although Smoke says it does not work." Best way is to try it out.

 

Weatherzone, I think works similarly to misc_weather_zone, and basically tells the game that it must calculate weather in that zone only, ignoring the rest. I think.

 

Lightjunior, I think it only affects dynamic models, like misc_model_static, misc_model_breakable, player models, and such. But I haven't really used it that much, so I may be wrong.

 

Terrain... the description reads "This is one of the most complex shaders, it will allow you making nice terrains with blended textures. To see how this is used, go Help > General > Terrain Manual in GtkRadiant." It's a good tutorial, I think. It also mentions a terrain entity. Also, I think I came across a terrain shader of some sort, maybe to be used with the terrain entity, but I'm not sure.

[IrocJeff]

So on that Anti Portal thing...would I just use that instead of the caulk texture for any unseen, non-textured terrain brush faces?

[mrwonko]

So on that Anti Portal thing...would I just use that instead of the caulk texture for any unseen, non-textured terrain brush faces?

No. Then you might as well not make it Detail, but that would create an absurd amount of portals. You need to understand how Vis/BSP works in order to be able to properly understand what they do and how to use them.

[eezstreet]

Terrain isn't used and doesn't do anything under normal circumstances. It's used for Random Map Generation. I never got that to work properly, but it's basically a port from SOF2 to JKA.

[IrocJeff]

Yeah, I remember that from Soldier of Fortune 2. I used to play that online quite a bit and loved those random generated maps.