Visgroups II - page 2 - The old way
Prior to version 1.5, you had to select a group of objects and assign them to a visgroup. BUT! You had to be careful about how you did it. You could (but shouldn't) select all the objects in a room and make a VisGroup out of them.
You see, the old VisGroup's had the nasty habit of changing the properties of the entities in that room - especially if there was a mixture of Solidclass and Pointclass entities in the same room.
Solidclass entities are entities that you 'made' out of a solid - such as selecting a brush and making a func_door out of it. Pointclass entities are, for the most part, invisible. They include things like lights, player starts, ambient sounds, etc. and visible objects like ammo boxes and weapons. Therefore, a func_door entity would have different properties than say, a player start or an ammo box.
But VisGroups 1.3 made no such distinction. It would randomly apply the same attributes to a 'light' entity as those applied to a func_plat.
Fixing this kind of map corruption was a long, labourious task - editing the .map file with a text editor such as DOS Edit or Notepad. But a new utility is out there that can easily fix your old maps and I recommend doing so before you load them into WC 1.5. It's called the Quake Map Validator by Andrew Smith and is the best thing I've ever seen to handle this problem.
This problem, thankfully, has been fixed in version 1.5.
Before you assigned your objects to a VisGroup though, you had to create some VisGroups. For a complete look at the process, read my first Visgroups tutorial that I mentioned on the previous page.
Now, once your VisGroups were made, you would select what ever group(s) you wanted to see in the Filter Control dialog box and hit Apply. Then, everything else on the screen would disappear except the select VisGroup(s).
A Whole New Ballgame
To see how VisGroups in WC 1.5 have changed, we'll take a look at a section of vgtutmap.map (this one has no VisGroups) and explore a wonderful new feature of WC called AutoSelect.
In this first example, I'll be selecting a two_story building in the centre of the map with AutoSelect turned on.
Here's where the AutoSelect button is:

AutoSelect will take some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, you can make very precise selections. It works much the way Shift-ENTER did in earlier versions of WC, except that you don't have to hit the ENTER key. :)
Here, I'm selecting the two story room. Left click and drag your selection area.

Now, when you let go of the mouse button, voila! Everything you wanted to select is selected.

Take a look at the first pic. You'll notice that the lower part of the selection area just touches one of walls. This is a good way to make sure that you get the whole room.
Now look what happens if we stray too far to the right or the left with the selection box:
    
See? We snagged part of the adjoining hallway. The best way to learn how to use AutoSelect is just practice selecting different portions of VisGroupTutmap1 until you get proficient at grabbing only what you want. It doesn't take long to get the hang of it either. Explore!
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