UE1 - UT Glass question

[gopostal]

I've searched pretty vigorously and I've read most every glass tutorial but I have a question concerning glass that I can't find answered anywhere.

If you have a creature spawn on the other side of glass, you cannot see the newly spawned creature unless you move a little. Then it renders ok and is visible. Is this a known bug or am I building the glass wrong? I've tried special/semi/non every possible combination. It renders fine in offline playtest but as soon as I put it on the server the glass occludes the spawned monsters until I move around a little.

Thanks for looking at this!

 

[War_Master]

that has nothing to do with the glass at all. Meshes completely disappear after 5 seconds if half their polys are not visible to the player and that only happens while you're a client online. There's nothing you can do about since it is built-in in the engine to increase performance. The good thing about it is that radar hackers can't see you if the mesh becomes invisible and theres no way to prevent it.

A good example on this is by playing the MH-MinasTirith map online where all the skaarjs up top are not visible even if they are moving around but not showing half their mesh poly count.

 

[War_Master]

oh, I forgot to mention the trick on making good see through glass.

Instead of using an additive brush for the glass, use a sheet instead just for the glass effect and set it to Translucent. Then, to block everything for the solidity of the glass, use an Invisible Collision Hull brush. This trick will make everything on the other side visible at all times if you're looking directly at the actor through the glass.

 

[gopostal]

Interesting. That must be why the monsters disappear sometimes when you are looking at them.

I actually did the sheet thing from a tut I found here:
http://pages.eidosnet.co.uk/~sironfoot/unreal/wintutorial/windows.htm

but it didn't help it at all. It seems that a newly spawned actor on the other side of glass is attempted to be visually excluded by the server's engine. I wonder if glass occlusion can be recoded to hack this or if this is source code stuff? Anyhow, I guess I'll leave it as is (it could be worse) and add it to my "see what I could do with it" rainy day list. Thanks War. :tup:

 

[War_Master]

I remember there was another trick to it which I found when I used to exploit mapping. I think I added ZoneInfos on each of the rooms and set them to bGameRelevant=True or bAlwaysRelevant=True on both of them. I did that back in 2003 and cant remember very well but try it and see if that does it.

Also, make sure you zoned the rooms properly using a ZonePortal sheet but place them about 16 units inside the room so the outer side wont give you an HOM. Zoning the rooms and using ZoneInfos is what brakes a map for rendering it into pieces and give you better performance so that only the zones that are visible get rendered.