Re: CTF-Blice (WIP)
Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2019 5:41 pm
In terms of playability, please set your expectations as low as possible, because this map is becoming more of a mini tech demo than a map meant for online play.
Don't take me wrong, the map has a good performance (thus far), and will be playable online, but it's also the map I am putting most work on ever when it comes to adding some detail and texturing, and pushing my own old effects package to the extreme to see how much it can handle (that whole bloom that you see), and as a result the map is getting very very big and complex, at around 34MB right now, with almost 3000 brushes (most of them merged already into more elaborated shapes), and it will get bigger, since I still have the corridors and outdoors to worry about (although not as much as the bases).
Having that said, I have some good and bad news:
Good news: Although I am pretty much at 50k nodes, which would generally mean that I have to compromise the detail on the rest of the map, that's by using the "Rebuild BSP" button, however if I do a "Rebuild All" with the default build settings, it optimizes the map down to around 34k nodes, with seemingly no BSP issues that I have seen (if there are, they didn't really pop) and slightly better performance it seemed to me, meaning that I still have some margin to finish the map like I want it to.
Bad news: While I was in the process of finishing the back part of the bases yesterday, it started to crash the renderer (namely the OpenGL one from Chris everyone uses).
I tracked the problem down to what seems to be the number of lights within the same area, although I had no idea that the number of static lights would cause any issues other than longer build times (if anyone would like to shed some light on this matter, please do so, I would like to know if this limit is really a thing).
One of the lighting techniques I use is to use small tiny radius lights with max brightness near the light sources, so the light sources themselves look bright, and then higher radius and lower brightness lights to actually lit up whatever the light source is meant to lit up.
In each single base I have about 1400 lights right now, 95% of them being these small radius ones near the light sources.
But I have a plan I will start with today, which is to optimize and cut down on the number of lights, and by my rough calculations I may be able to remove at least around 200 lights from each base, by making adjacent light sources using a single higher radius light.
Fortunately I have the lights divided by groups, so I can check and evaluate each group one by one more easily, but, although probably in the end the map will still look very similarly to what I have been shown, this may mean that the map may no longer look exactly the same, lighting-wise, since this will effectively lower the resolution a bit relative what I aimed for.
Don't take me wrong, the map has a good performance (thus far), and will be playable online, but it's also the map I am putting most work on ever when it comes to adding some detail and texturing, and pushing my own old effects package to the extreme to see how much it can handle (that whole bloom that you see), and as a result the map is getting very very big and complex, at around 34MB right now, with almost 3000 brushes (most of them merged already into more elaborated shapes), and it will get bigger, since I still have the corridors and outdoors to worry about (although not as much as the bases).
Having that said, I have some good and bad news:
Good news: Although I am pretty much at 50k nodes, which would generally mean that I have to compromise the detail on the rest of the map, that's by using the "Rebuild BSP" button, however if I do a "Rebuild All" with the default build settings, it optimizes the map down to around 34k nodes, with seemingly no BSP issues that I have seen (if there are, they didn't really pop) and slightly better performance it seemed to me, meaning that I still have some margin to finish the map like I want it to.
Bad news: While I was in the process of finishing the back part of the bases yesterday, it started to crash the renderer (namely the OpenGL one from Chris everyone uses).
I tracked the problem down to what seems to be the number of lights within the same area, although I had no idea that the number of static lights would cause any issues other than longer build times (if anyone would like to shed some light on this matter, please do so, I would like to know if this limit is really a thing).
One of the lighting techniques I use is to use small tiny radius lights with max brightness near the light sources, so the light sources themselves look bright, and then higher radius and lower brightness lights to actually lit up whatever the light source is meant to lit up.
In each single base I have about 1400 lights right now, 95% of them being these small radius ones near the light sources.
But I have a plan I will start with today, which is to optimize and cut down on the number of lights, and by my rough calculations I may be able to remove at least around 200 lights from each base, by making adjacent light sources using a single higher radius light.
Fortunately I have the lights divided by groups, so I can check and evaluate each group one by one more easily, but, although probably in the end the map will still look very similarly to what I have been shown, this may mean that the map may no longer look exactly the same, lighting-wise, since this will effectively lower the resolution a bit relative what I aimed for.