Quake BSP info from Carmack

Antony Suter (antony@werple.mira.net.au)
Thu, 07 Mar 1996 00:01:45 +1000

Message-Id: <199603061306.AAA16200@melb.werple.net.au>
Date: Thu, 07 Mar 1996 00:01:45 +1000
To: quake-editing@nvg.unit.no
From: Antony Suter <antony@werple.mira.net.au>
Subject: Quake BSP info from Carmack

The all algorithmical Carmack has been kind enough to grace me with some
correspondance. The points are below.

note: as Magnus and Raphael have pointed out, expect the Quake file formats
to change!

- not going to release BSP code till game is final.
- changes are still happening.
- will need optimization to run well on most machines:-
- they run it on a 4 CPU alpha box with 128 MB RAM. (my other car is a
Mercedes!)
- The full map processing is actually three seperate programs:
qbsp: which builds minimized drawing and clipping hulls from a solid geometry
description of the world. This is the memory pig that can chew up 50+ resident
megs on big levels. Single threaded, but most levels only take a minute or so
to run.
light: builds the surface lighting maps. Fully parallelel, generally taking a
few minutes to make a high quality run, or less for a non-filtered version.
vis: builds the potentially visible set. Fully parallel. This is the CPU pig.
It is wildly content dependant (combinatorially sensitve), so some levels may
only take a minute or so, but there is one level we have that takes nearly an
hour even on 4 cpus.

During development, subsets of the suite are run, and only for full testing is
the vis program run.

And to go with your lemon scented paper napkins, he said:-

"I suspect a lot of university computers are going to find new tasks at
night :-)"

--
- Antony Suter  <antony@werple.mira.net.au>  (Rohan, of Middle Earth)
- "Pick a signature, any signature. As long as it's this one".