proof once and for all axetogrind walls

[[BTF]DeathStalker]

I've played a2g for several years myself and while there have been many instances where I was like "woh, theres NO WAY", i haven't ever been able knock anything out with a spec on him so i'm on the fence. While i've suspected it, i've never been able to capter it. The first demo could go either way, he catches a glips of chain grabber and throws a rocket in its general direction while trying to grab mega OR thats the ONE SPOT where people apear out of nowhere and rape you while your busy eyeballing the mega. I'm going with the later. And btw, as far as his skill level dropping some have mentioned, it could be that he's just gottin older and the ole eyes just aren't what they used to be. We have LCDs now, but how many years has he been 2-3 ft away from the old CTRs before these came along ??? Remember being told "don't set to close to the TV it'l hurt your eyes. Well theres alot of truth to that.

[gaudy]

frag 8 to 9, the underwater shot, he had no way of knowing someone was there

Hmm, he shoots two hidden things underwater on that frag.  First a corpse (left), then a player (right).

Not sure why he would aim at the corpse unless he just felt like trying to shoot it.  Or if he was just spamming in that direction.  But the aim is pretty dead-on both objects.

I'll be out of town today, but I'm interested in other opinions on this frag by admins & experienced players.

Is there any way to remove the water texture and analyze his cursor placement with regards to the hitboxes of both objects that were shot?

[VaeVictis]

frag 8 to 9, the underwater shot, he had no way of knowing someone was there

Hmm, he shoots two hidden things underwater on that frag.  First a corpse (left), then a player (right).

Not sure why he would aim at the corpse unless he just felt like trying to shoot it.  Or if he was just spamming in that direction.  But the aim is pretty dead-on both objects.

I'll be out of town today, but I'm interested in other opinions on this frag by admins & experienced players.

Is there any way to remove the water texture and analyze his cursor placement with regards to the hitboxes of both objects that were shot?

watch the demo with a wallhack lol otherwise, no

[[BTF]DeathStalker]

Ok, watched the second demo.
I didn't see anything in it that says wall but seen pleanty that said NO wall.

First: when it starts he's in battle at the RL water and shoots a spam rocket where his opponant "was", hoping he'll step back. That tells me he wasn't sure exactly where he was.

Second: right after his first frag he makes his way to the RG room, nails a guy heading to rg but then MIS-predicts where he's going from there, shoots to the left catwalk but the guy went right.

Third: frag #3, totally unaware the RL guys was coming around the corner.
and
Fourth: the infamous frag 9. If I had a $1.00 for every time some nailed me that just came out of that water the moment i turned my back to go get the mega i could take out stock in id. Hammer out a few rounds on both sides of the pylon at the water just to be sure I'll have no followers would be good practice, just in case

[UUD-40]

Spam.

[fdrjk]

Spam.

[Acer]

Is there any way to remove the water texture and analyze his cursor placement with regards to the hitboxes of both objects that were shot?

watch the demo with a wallhack lol otherwise, no

What can and can't be seen by a wallhack depends on how the map's BSP is being rendered and cached. In Quake2 it's impossible to see entities that are in non-transparent liquids; wallhack or no wallhack. Unless you partially enter the liquid yourself. Now I'm not sure if an aimbot can hit a target even if the model itself is not yet visible (I suspect it can), but I know that a wallhack is useless in the scenario of non-transparent water.

-edit: what I said above is still true but that 9th frag is very strange and, technically a wallhack could see stuff in that water from his position as his feet are in and stuff is being drawn. The reverse is also true, if you're submerged in that water there it lets you see someone's feet in the shallow part of the water @ GL + shards. But again, when you're not (partially) in the water yourself it's impossible to see stuff that is.
-edit2: I guess with some recamming in keygrip one could pause the demo at that moment and detach the pov-cam from the subject and move it around to see what's there.

[[BTF] Reflex]

That's the argument I made with, I forget who, but it was a long and heated discussion.

He claimed it possible to see ppl underwater,  like even see players at the railgun on dm1 from anywhere on the map.
I dunno if he was right..  maybe there is a way to beat that limitation.

Apparently Quadz might have something to that effect,  he knew there was a body there for frag 9.

Someone else with a wallhack watching it said they couldn't see under the water.

[reaper]

I love how some of ya'll knock pretty much the only guy fixing security problems in the software.

also if Ax2grind cheats I think he'd win.  Yeah I kind of got a problem with Ax2grind : ).  I have played him I think twice, and beat him both times, but he still likes to talk shit in spectator.

 

[Acer]

I dunno if he was right..  maybe there is a way to beat that limitation.

^ see the edits in my previous post.
Anyway, opaque liquid volumes can be regarded as mini-maps, they are totally seperated from the rest of the map. The exterior gets cut off, like areaportal* doors that are closed.

* load up a singleplayer map like fact2. Type gl_showtris 1 (if it doesn't work also type gl_ext_multitexture 0) and look how the stuff behind most of the (areaportal) doors is not being drawn when the doors are closed. This is what happens with opaque liquid areas. The water area on dm5 is slightly different because of the extended shallow part @ lower GL.

[Whirlingdervish]

Acer is on the right path here.. When a q2 map is run thru qvis.exe during it's build, it stores values of what can be seen from any point on the map.

What can be 'seen' from any point is determined by cutting the map into triangular planes and using these to represent each area from which you can "see" something.

for the most part this will make it so that the renderer only draws things that are about 1 or 2 corners away from you and this saves you lots of rendering power (and makes for higher fps). depending on the map geometry tho, everything on the map could technically be seen by the renderer from any point if the barriers that block your actual vision don't totally extend from floor to ceiling. (ex: on wdrail02 the entire rocky area and anything in it is visible to the renderer from any point on the map because there is nothing blocking visibilty from the floor to the sky.)

Say you're looking at a crate, your renderer will see everything on your side and on the other side of the crate.
If the same crate were extended into a pillar that went from floor to ceiling you'd probably still be able to see the other side, but if the pillar was made very wide, there is a chance you won't be able to see things directly behind it and instead just slightly around the corner of it.
With opaque water, it completely cuts off the view to the other side because it cant be seen "around" like a wall. The space on the other side of the plane that defines the water's surface is entirely hidden from anything outside of the 3d space that the body of water defines because this plane is used preferentially during the vis process of the build.

I'm not sure that it would work, but if there were a way to make the client report that the hash for the map being played is correct, when in fact you are using a copy of the map that hasn't been run through qvis.exe, your copy of the map would have everything visible from everywhere. (you can make a .bsp without qvis.exe but it comes out fullbright and with no vis data)
I'm not entirely sure in this case if the water would be a barrier to visibility, but in any other it definitely is.

One way I can think of to easily spot people under water would be a long verticle head spike on the model, like the one skillz showed us that Razor was handing out.
Q2 player models are always oriented vertically, no matter how they are moving, so a player with a long verticle spike would show like a submarine with a periscope up, depending on the depth of the water and the length of the spike.

[console]

Apparently Quadz might have something to that effect,  he knew there was a body there for frag 9.

Someone else with a wallhack watching it said they couldn't see under the water.

For whatever reason, that particular water area in q2dm5 doesn't always exclude entities on the other side of its boundary.

If I sit completely underwater with a wallhack, I can still see the quad damage and health bonus items above.

Correspondingly, if I drop an item into the water from above (e.g, grenade ammo) I can see the ammo at the bottom of the pool even if I am completely out of the water.  (Depending on where I stand...)

So... not sure why, but, this water doesn't behave like the usual area portal, compared to, say, the rail pool in q2dm1.


 

[Whirlingdervish]

So... not sure why, but, this water doesn't behave like the usual area portal, compared to, say, the rail pool in q2dm1.

I opened up q2dm5.bsp in my map editor and I noticed that the water in that area under the quad has the trans33 flag set on it. It appears to be opaque, and I'm not sure how, but the flag for transparent water is set.

that might cause some wierdness with the visibility calculations..

I also noticed that in the actual .bsp the spot where you can see the stuff above the water with the wallhack kind of corresponds to where the func_rotating entity is sitting in the map. For some reason it's not where it actually turns in the map and it's position puts it in place to bisect the surface of the water with the shaft part of it.

I'm not sure how brush models are handled in the vis stage of the build but it seems odd that it lines up with the spot so well.

here's the view with wh from where it is:


here's the brush model:

[reaper]

 

[Acer]

For some reason it's not where it actually turns in the map and it's position puts it in place to bisect the surface of the water with the shaft part of it.

Yes that's kind of strange but it's probably because func_rotating entities must have an originbrush which isn't visible in the compiled bsp. When the bsp is decompiled to map there should be a visible origin brush somewhere inside that pillar.

I remember encountering the same kind of frustrating glitches with some stupid test maps I did in the past. I had found that when brushes flagged as 'detail' intersect important portal/hint planes they could really mess up the Vis process. With that in mind I did some testing with the decompiled q2dm5 map and what do you know, same problem, same solution. Haha the ID guys obviously didn't know what to do with it either since in the decompiled map you can see they put a cube of hint brushes around that pillar, without success. I've attached an incomplete and messy decompiled version of q2dm5, only difference is that I deleted the detailed lower part of the pillar and sides of the ladder and now the water acts like normal opaque water again. Go figure..