Hacker News Reader

Comment by ahoka | Hacker News Reader

You can do much more in Blender and it takes around a month to get to a decent level with it. BSP is just outdated and limiting. If you want to add small details and variance, then just make smaller models and combine them in creative ways, together with decals, texture atlases, etc.

View on HN

BSP is a technique for optimizing visibility calculations on convex level geometry. You're still making a 3D model and that's exactly what's stored as part of a .bsp file. So the point isn't BSP being outdated.

Just Trenchbroom and tools like it have more of a Minecraft creative mode simplicity to them, with click and drag snap to grid rapid prototyping of basic level geometry, and even more advanced geometry and details (including creating slopes and cylindrical structures, rafters, vents, general architectural details), than Blender's out of box generic UX presentation intended for all use cases of 3D design.

its not actually about the PVS although it greatly simplifies those algorithms.

its actually quite redundant in many ways.

Pretty sure Quake mappers are getting by just fine without Blender:

https://www.quaddicted.com/files/quaddicted-images/by-sha256...

Yeah, GtkRadiant was pretty much sufficient for creating complex maps despite some bugs here and there.

Oh most (if not all) of the stuff I linked was made with TrenchBroom[0], but yeah, regardless haha

[0] https://trenchbroom.github.io/

They're creative tools. The "better" one is the one that the artist is most comfortable with. I've seen working professional artists who still rely on ancient abandoned software from dead companies.

Years ago I learned about the tools that one of my favorite bands used. At the time where Intel Macs were taking the world by storm, these guys were still using G4 towers in their studio and had no interest in using anything new. I'm sure they moved onto something newer, but who knows how long that took. Indeed, an artist's relationship with their tools takes some time to develop and isn't easily cast aside!

There's a good chance this might be down to Apple's constantly changing foundations and the fact that a studio's worth of music software can (especially back then) cost a lot of money to upgrade on top of the new hardware requiring the upgrade in the first place. And that's not going into the case where the company that wrote the software has gone bust.

Given you mentioned G4, there's a good chance they had recent memory of having to upgrade a load of stuff to jump from OS9 to OSX. The Intel architecture change required another upgrade for a lot of software, so it probably made a lot of sense to try and eek more value out of the previous round of purchasing before going again.

Hopefully they delayed enough to not get hit rapidly by the changes in Yosemite, Mojave or Catalina which all necessitated upgrades (IIRC, one might have only been some edge cases) or finally the most recent jump to ARM—which still isn't natively supported by a surprising number of DAW or VST vendors.

On Windows I can run any DAW or VST that's been written since about 2006 natively and can even load up a 32-bit DAW if I want to dust off some ancient project with ancient VSTs that never made the jump to 64-bits.

You can technically do "much more" in Blender, as it is a full blown mesh editor, but (quake-like) brush-based editors are *MUCH* faster -and easier- to work with. The limits do allow for making some things easier.

And unless you are targeting vanilla Quake (or a game with similar limitations), you can still use smaller models (and modular meshes) for details, etc, so you get the best of both worlds.

Also FWIW i don't think Blender is always the best even for such environment props - for some geometry (mainly man-made stuff) something like Wings3D can be faster to work with than Blender.

In fact implementing brush support was one of the first things i added to my engine's world editor[0][1][2] and adding Wings3D-like mesh editing is something i've considered (i implemented the data structure and basic operations years ago[3], but i'd need to convert the code to use the engine's geometry code and of course implement the editor UI for it).

[0] https://i.imgur.com/S2VtAn6.jpg

[1] https://i.imgur.com/RPfG3Ee.png

[2] https://i.imgur.com/lOhmyoq.png

[3] https://i.imgur.com/4Zk9Td7.png

You’re not responding to the article.

> BSP is just outdated and limiting

- In quake brushes are not just visual, but are also used to solve collisions. Without brushes you need separate “collision meshes”.

- brush based editors are much faster for prototyping space shapes. Art can always be improved later and is even outsourced. Gameplay is harder to get right.

- brushes are easier to reason about in processing for auto generating UV coordinates and light mapping

> just make smaller models and combine them in creative ways

This is a cost saving choice, not a better game choice.

What games do you want to play? The ones where the space is tailor made? Or the ones with a lot of copy paste?

Also if you look at the spaces in the article, they don’t have a lot of clutter anyway.

I’m responding to the article, which says:

“You can see the frame of the room is made up of four static pieces which I’ve been glued together. This type of prefabbing makes it impossible to add little details or variations into the structure of an existing asset, you need to change the one, or make a new one.”

Blender certainly has many more features, but I've been bouncing off of it for years- every time I try to learn it I get overwhelmed by all the minutia. Trenchbroom just feels more natural, and for lower fidelity quake-style maps its all you really need

> You can do much more in Blender and it takes around a month to get to a decent level with it. BSP is just outdated and limiting.

You are comparing apples to oranges.

I don't think it's about BSP's per say, it's about being able to use Brushes. Current Unreal Engine still supports these I think (it's been a minute since I looked). It can be a nice prototype workflow.

BSPs (or CSG in general) is still present even in modern engines due to how quickly it allows designers to build levels. Even when it’s only used for prototyping prior to an art pass.

not really, sadly, we get the bad tools, but none of the performance benefits because it all gets turned into dumb polygon soup.

unreal's performance is embarassingly bad. they get their culling backwards. its a masterclass in how to piss clock cycles up the wall.

you can make a BSP from polygon soup too. not respecting the value of convex volumes is one of the most damning problems in modern games. its entirely why they all perform like dogshit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com