I've been wondering lately how much effect NULL'ing up non-visible brush faces has on the wpoly count? Anyone who knows about this please let me in on it, does it reduce wpoly by much?

i think so, tho im not 100% sure, i do know sky texture eliminates wpolys

Originally posted by RaNd0M
I've been wondering lately how much effect NULL'ing up non-visible brush faces has on the wpoly count? Anyone who knows about this please let me in on it, does it reduce wpoly by much? Non visible by who?
Normal player (non-spectator) or engine ?

doesn't nulling faces that the player can't see stop the engine from drawing them once the maps compiled? or thats how I understand it. I'm not sure on the effects it has on wpoly/epoly but I'd assume it would be quite effective.

The fact that the map doesnt have to render shadows and lighting in these areas has to help a little, on performance, atleast thats what i thought, as far as wpoly, by nulling id guess since it isnt rendering the faces that it also doesnt render them as wpoly?

The engine doesn't render any faces with the null texture applied to it, so as a result r_speeds are much lower. In some cases, especially with complex terrain...the wpoly count has known to become about a quarter of what it originally was just through this technique.

Whenever I have completed a map, I always apply the null texture to EVERYTHING on the map in another copy, and using the original copy of the map go around applying the textures only to the faces the player can see so the engine dis-regards non-visible faces when running the bsp file.

It will also result in faster compile times, so null is one of the most effective methods in keeping the r_speeds at a minimum

thats for that el capitan, i was really wondering about it because with dod_harbor i started doing it, null'ing every face not visible to the player, and in a lot of places my wpoly is around 200 so yer ;D

Is there anything special to do with null when compiling, or do you just apply the null texture to faces and nothing else special to do?

thats all you have to do, put the NULL texture onto all faces that arnt visible by the player and compile, nothing else.

Null is your best friend. I suggest building all your solids in the null texture, then apply textures only to visible faces.

Originally posted by TheNomad
thats all you have to do, put the NULL texture onto all faces that arnt visible by the player and compile, nothing else.

The tools have to support the NULL function as well. There are no negatives to using NULL, the only problem is having NULLed a place that players see and forget about it :)

Capitan, I do a reverse of your method where every brush is null to start with and I just apply the texture to the few visible sides. Both methods achieve the same thing though.

yeah i make all my brushes wih null and only textures the faces visible to the players

This one's funny:

http://www.dayofdefeat.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=3951

Originally posted by haircut
This one's funny:

http://www.dayofdefeat.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=3951

informative yes... but how funny? :confused:

Null textures are of no benefit on faces that are flush to other faces and can't be rendered. Those are discarded anyway. Null is very useful for things like rooftops and hidden areas that can't be seen anyway. Furthermore it is a good idea to null texture anything that might have been blocked but has been moved to a brush entity such as a function wall. Faces that were obscured by the brush will now be rendered as brush based entity faces are not discarded. The areas of a func wall that can not be seen anyway should still have the null texture applied to it to avoid rendering.

Originally posted by Powerslide
Null textures are of no benefit on faces that are flush to other faces and can't be rendered. Those are discarded anyway. Null is very useful for things like rooftops and hidden areas that can't be seen anyway. Furthermore it is a good idea to null texture anything that might have been blocked but has been moved to a brush entity such as a function wall. Faces that were obscured by the brush will now be rendered as brush based entity faces are not discarded. The areas of a func wall that can not be seen anyway should still have the null texture applied to it to avoid rendering.

Although faces on the outsides of the map that aren't flush with anything (i.e. touching the void) often are compiled with, i.e. lightmaps and time compiling are spent on them when they could be nulled out and used in your visible map area.