Oops, polygon spans more than one brush.

[Lady Rowena]

This is a new one for me! Dromed crashes without any warning to the desktop. This error appears in the monolog.
It happens during optimizazion, after working on a me-only area and added a few (only 3) brushes.
What the hell does it means?

[R Soul]

It could be that some brushes intersect in a strange way.

Examine Crash000.log

There may be things like:
Brush 1764 (face 1)

If there are lots of entries for the same face and brush then that could be the cause of the problem.

Make sure you don't have any cuboid brushes that are rotated by a multiple of 90. As well as being a possible cause of this sort of error, that sort of rotation is unnecessary and quite sloppy.

In Dromed use the command hilight_brush 1764 to find that brush. Note that the brush number is the 'Time' value +1
It's not always easy to see a highlighted terrain brush so you can select any brush with a similar Time and use Tab/Shift-Tab to cycle to the correct one.

[Lady Rowena]

The strange thing is that I'm carrying on two twins missions, so I'm forced to duplicate each part they have in common. I mission A everything is fine, I'm having the error only in mission B.
Also, I discovered that the offending brush is one that was already there, I only have lengthened it.
I'll try to add a brush instead of streching the existing one, otherwise I'll have to delete all the work I did also from mission A.

Thank you for answering R Soul.

BTW, I don't know why but I don't have any crash.log.

[Lady Rowena]

Ok, I went 1 save back and I discovered that I already had that error before enlarging the one I thought was the offending brush (which is a sewer, 8 sides cylinder) , so I went 2 saves back, where I had a me-only area, I optimized the level without deleting anything and this time no errors. (this was weird)

I managed to strech the sewer again, I optimized, I run the pathfind db, optimized again, because I have several active areas. All was OK, no errors, not even in the monolog.

Yesterday I kept on working and I added 2 porticullis and some objects, patrol points, etc....NO TERRAIN!
Today I had the bad idea to try to optimize again and the level crashed to the desktop again! the monolog reports the same error!
Not only I have HUNDREDS of "Oops, polygon spans more than one brush", but also six of this:

[ged_rmap.c@59] Too Many Brushes in Level

But I think I didn't hit the limit yet!

I have a total brushes of 6960
3647 terrain
2680 objects
22 lights
568 rooms
32 flow
12 area - 0 active

However, how can the level crash during optimization if I didn't add any terrain?

The last line of the nonolog says:

Fatal exception occured; dumping crash info to log...

but I don't have any crash info, so I don't know where the error is
IF there is a single error....

I am desperate, I just don't know what to do.....

[R Soul]

2680 objects

Make sure you've increased the limit in dark.cfg.


I don't know why I have a crash000.log file but you don't. Maybe you should create a blank text file with that name (making sure that .log really is the extension) and see if Dromed can access it.

[Lady Rowena]

R Soul

Creating a crash000.log file didn't help. I have 3 installations of T2 and Dromed and in none of them it worked.

Also increasing the object limits in dark.cfg didn't work. Maybe it's because I had already increased that limit to 3500 with the command "resize_obj_id_space" ?
Maybe Dromed thinks that I have 3500 objects already?

Anyway, you were right, the blame was of the objects. That "polygon spans...." made me think of a building error...
After your suggestion I remembered a huge FM, Heist Society, they say that they couldn't optimize it anymore.
I loaded that FM....WOW more than 9000 brushes there! Well, I tried to optimize it and.....it crashed to the desktop and the monolog reported the same error as mine.

So I made a test: I deleted about 50 objects from my mission and voila! I can optimize again!
Well, I don't know if I will add some more terrain to my level, maybe not. But at least if I want to, now I know that I have to delete some objects.

Many thanks R Soul.

[R Soul]

In that case it's worth remembering that you can save objects by making simple things like tables also act like anything from the TrapTrig section of the heirarchy by adding to it the relevant script and links.

[john9818a]

Uncadonego maybe this solution can help you.

[uncadonego]

Thank john9818a.

So Lady Rowena deleted about 50 objects and that worked. Does anyone know if she added objects back after building? I need lots of markers and AI and furnishings to go.

It's just weird that if I delete the last tiny bit of construction and optimize, it's OK. The time just before that, fiddling around with that bit of construction also got rid of it.

Dromed Info

Brush Counts:
4183 Terrain, 2985 Object
19 Light, 926 Room
34 Flow, 1 Area - 0 active

Object IDs:
3007 used, 5176 free (of max 8183)

[uncadonego]

I tried deleted about 60 objects, from grass to trees and desks and chairs, planters, everything except markers, AI, or objects with door or other properties on them. The eight Oops warnings are still there. So whatever worked for Lady Rowena didn't work here. Deleting the brushes that make the hallway in the last small build session did, however, eliminate them, as previously mentioned.

I replaced all my stair supports and hand rails made by brushes with objects instead, so now I can hilight_check_snap 1, with no matching brushes, so that's not it either.

Does anybody really understand this?

Should I just continue, or is this going to crash?

Four days no new build because I don't want to go any further without knowing.....

Addendum: Removing brushes from my second last build gets rid of the warnings, even if I leave the new hallway from my last build. Getting rid of the hallway from my last build gets rid of the warnings, even if I leave the brushes from my second last build. So it's not so much the location, since the brushes from the last build and the brushes from the second last build are in two different locations. Could this be Dromed not having a more specific warning to give?

Another question: Will non-axial brushes screw things up? These brushes are however, from the stage of development from 11 years ago without warnings.

[R Soul]

Without seeing your mission it's hard to tell, but non-axial brushes sound are risky things to use. Try using wedges, which can be grid snapped, to approximate the shapes instead. If that's not feasible you have to swallow your pride and allow those parts to be visually simplified.

Have a look at the screenshots here:
http://catmanofiowa.com/RSoul/fm2.html#mission3
(thumbnails on the left)

The second one shows the stairs up to the front doors.
Scroll down and you'll see that they used to be rounded. I think I used combinations of flood/evaporate etc cylinders to smooth off the edges, but the steps were non-axial. I don't think I got any errors (it was more the prospect of trying to build the edges that stumped me), but the above shows a good example of how you can keep everything clean and still get a nice looking result.

[uncadonego]

But why would some non-axial brushes that have existed without issue for 11 years without any warnings show up as an Oops warning now, but be rectified only by deleting one of the two last small areas I have worked on?

P.S.- I hilighted non-axial, and then snapped hilighted. Optimizing no longer showed the errors, but I can go back three saves and optimize without errors, even though all the non-axial brushes are there. If I can get through, I'd rather leave it, because it entirely spins the cylindrical library by the smallest bit to throw off the entrance and textures.

I don't know if I've ever released anything without some warnings. Has this ever crashed someone's mission that anyone knows of?

[R Soul]

It could be that the more recent brushwork interacts with the old brushwork in some way (again, without seeing it I can only speculate). Or it could be a red herring. I'd be interested in looking at the mission to see if anything stands out as being problematic.

[uncadonego]

Send me a PM with your e-mail address. I'll send you a mission zip file through Filestofriends if you're really interested in looking at it. The recent brushwork is miles to the north and a few hundred feet up the z axis of the non-axial brushes.

[gamophyte]

I may be off base, but I had apex pyramids causing this issue, but never had an issue in early builds, then one day the error gave me coordinates right at them (I removed one then issue targeted the other). I instead used a wedge and cut the outside with air brushes to get the taper I wanted.*Issue went away.

[R Soul]

I've been experimenting. Here are my findings:
hilight_nonaxial is more fussy than I thought. I thought it only highlighted brushes whose rotation was not 'grid snapped' (i.e multiples of 22.5), but it actually looks for multiples of 90, which is very strict.

The library can be fixed without too much drama. You have to make the cylinders 'align by sides' before creating them. The replacement cylinders will need to have smaller dimensions but they can closely match what was there before. For the parts with the bookshelf textures, 46x46 should do. Also worth trying out the uvmap_cylinder command to get the texture to align neatly to the faces.

The ruined stairs near the starting point have diagonal beams that are also not 'snap' rotated. Same for some wooden trim to the north (376.5, 320.125, 104.375 and its counterpart). Removing them (replacing with wedge-derived brushwork or objects) and fixing the library seems to eliminate the error message in the thread title. The brushwork of that room is a bit odd. It would be better with just one cuboid and one wedge for the basic room shape, and some solid brushes for the steps.


I also noticed some pyramid brushes that were 4 sided but rotated 45 degrees (revealed by the hilight_nonaxial command). Again, better to remake them after choosing align by sides so their edges properly line up with the cuboid brushes they're attached to.

There are some places with 3 sided cylinders. I think they should be replaced with 4 sided cylinders aligned by vertices. I don't think they're causing errors but with 4 sided cylinders or wedges you can keep all the vertices on the grid.

[uncadonego]

I know all of that stuff eliminates the error messages, I did most of that stuff as an experiment and saw the errors go away, but didn't save it. What mussed me up was that deleting the last or second last room I built, which have no issues like that, also got rid of the errors. That's what threw me for a loop.

Addendum: Tried replacing library brushes with cylinders aligned by sides but the warnings were still there. However hilighting non-axial then snapping them eliminates the warnings, but then the brushes aren't aligned right. I replaced the broken stairs risers with objects, and I replaced the rooftops four sided pyramids rotated at 45 degrees but the warnings are still there.

Will keep experimenting from time to time.

[john9818a]

ZB posted this link in another thread: https://nothings.org/gamedev/thief_rendering.html

The Thief editor was (is?) notorious for having weird problems where a change to one brush might trigger a failure in the CSG generator at an entirely unrelated place in the level--a failure which meant the level simply failed to "compile".

I see this as one example, but overall changing or adding brushes at one end of the map can affect something on the other.

[uncadonego]

So I may never really find it. As long as it doesn't crash, I guess I'm going to live with it with trepidation.

I know for sure deleting part of what I've worked on this week will make it go away, I also know that changing the rotation on the library cylinders will make it go away, which is very undesirable. And now I find it could be neither! Ha! Ha!
Dromed, what a temperamental domme.

I'd still like to thank R Soul for taking his personal time and effort to look through the file and find problems for me. We really have a communal atmosphere on this part of the boards.

[GORT]

I've dealt with this error in Enigmatic Treasure. It was about terrain brush placement. When you see this error in the mono, try to check what it says right before or after the error. There should be some coordinates. Try checking those areas. If the mono is going too fast for you to check, you can use the Pause/Break key to pause the process in time to see it. To continue, press any key.

Hope that helps.

[uncadonego]

In this case, if you read the mono text, there were no coordinates listed. This topic ended up getting split over two threads. You can read the monologue in this thread: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148985

[uncadonego]

Just kept on building......warnings disappeared. Freaky.