More on visiplanes, etc.

[Jayextee]

I, too have suffered at the wrath of Doom`s limit to visible linedefs. But, I want to know is there a way to find out whether you`re in danger of `overflowing` - *without* finding out the hard way - and then deleting a load of sectors that were no use, but made the thing `look nice`.

Does an editor have this function?

[Guest ChriS]

use a source port

[Jayextee]

I`m actually thinking of all those low-budget PC-owning people out there who are mainly limited to just your regular Doom2 when I edit levels. Like myself.

It`s no use actually getting a source port I maybe can`t run.

[Guest spacedog]

there is a source port (mbf or smmu) which happily runs in dos and you can set it so that when it detects a VPO, instead of crashing a warning sign pops up in the corner of the screen

[Guest Fanatic]

If you can't find an editor that shows visplane overflow problems (I don't know of any that can), use BSP 2.3 to compile your maps, and pass the -vp, -vpwarn, and -vpstart tags to detect them.

Here's what they mean (from passing bsp -help):

-vp Attempts to prevent visplane overflows
-vpwarn Warns about potential visplane overflows
-vpmark Marks visplane overflows with player starts
-thold <nnn> Threshold for visplane overflow (default 128)

This should help a good bit.

[Quasar]

SMMU includes a real-time visplane overflow detector, but it is only approximate, and if it fails to appear in a complex area one should not assume its 100% free of VPO's in the original engine.