Ued2 HOM problems

Hi,

I have serious HOM problems when I use UnrealEd2 for making UT maps. Up to a certain point, everything is OK. Then I add a couple more brushes, and suddently HOM effects appear w/o any apparent reason no matter how careful I am. This has happened to every map I have made so far. In one case I had about 20 substracted rectangular brushes (and nothing else) in the map, and there was a HOM! I spent a lot of time trying to eliminate the errors by using different arrangements of brushes, but in most cases it was unsuccessful.

Is there a mapping strategy which could help in avoiding the HOMs? I mean, any operations to avoid (e.g. someone mentioned that intersection and deintersection should not be used), what kind of geometry is the most likely cause of the HOMs, etc. I noticed for example that cutting the corners of rectangular brushes at 45 degrees caused HOMs in many cases.

I would greatly appreciate your advice. This problem is so frustrating that I am considering to stop map making (although I like to do it). Or I will just switch to Quake3 where decent editors are available. But Q3 sucks as compared to UT. (However, IMHO UnrealEd sucks even more.)

Nahand:

Thanks for the tip, I will try it.

The HOM caused by 45 degree cut: I cut the corners of additive brushes placed in a previously created substracted space, so I don't really see how one can create a hole to the void by this procedure. But even if I cut the corner of a brush substracted from the world, this should result in a new brush with a more complicated structure (more sides and vertices) but well defined boundaries. Where is the hole?

BTW, I agree that Q3 doesn't really suck, I just like UT better. Q3 textures make me crazy and depressed

Nahand said:

... Quake III doesn't suck. Welcome to Nalicity. If you just cut a 45º angle of your rectangle brushes and those brushes are the only thing in the editor, then it will HOM because you just made a hole in the brush directly to the editing void.
...

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Sandorski:

Thanks for the tips.

sandorski said:

Q3 does suck and UEd doesn't!

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I have played Q3 a little recently, and it is not so bad. Some of the maps have decent textures (not the horrible orange/brown **** used in most of the ID levels) and they play quite well. Anyway, let's say that Q3 does not suck, but UT rulez!

sandorski said:

Anyway, keep Grid Snapping On, keep grid on a Power of 2(16 or 32 recommended) when doing BSP work, and make your Brushes in a Power of 2 as well. That should allow you to align everything perfectly and prevent HOMs.

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I always have grid snapping on, and use power of 2 for the grid and for brushes. Unfortunately, it does not prevent HOMs (but probably I have less than otherwise would).

sandorski said:

If a HOM occurs, try Vertex Editing the last Brush or the Brush that appears as the offender and re-align it, Rebuild. You can also select and Delete then try to do the Brush over. Using Intersect/de-Intersect isn't a habit to get into, but sometimes it's worth a try(especially for doors or windows).

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Vertex editing may help (in that it will snap the vertex to a grid point). But the error may occur at a later step, when the coordinates are finally computed. In exported T3D files I noticed that some of the coordinates which should have been integers were not (e.g. 127.999986 instead of 128.000000). Bug in floating point calculations?