Hi,
I am really stuck and need some help for my current map. I hope that the work of the last three months wasn’t in vain. After finishing the terrain and the streets, I started the buildings some weeks ago. Normally I am getting around 70-80 FPS on my map (Mobile 1.7GHz Pentium M with Ati X600, 128MB) which is not optimum but workable without any optimizations. Now I noticed in some parts of the Map immediate drops to 40-50 FPS at approximate 40.000 rspeeds. I guess the Q3 engine calcs all visible Vertexes even I can’t see them from there (but the engine calcs them) and the showtris 2 result confirmed this.
To give you a short overview about it take a look over the command map:
At this time, there are not many buildings there, only the townhall at the left hand and two churches. But in the upper part of the map there will be many ruins and rubble, thus exploding the number of brushes there. I am feared that the FPS will drop there to unplayable performance, and finally bury this map. The map is 12288x12288 units with a fogclip at 4096 which greatly helps improving the performance, together with a one-layer sky.
Here some screenshots showing the “red spot” of my map, the townhall yard:
view towards the right side of the command map
same position with showtris 2
top view of this area
same position with showtris 2
I tried some optimizations but none worked well, some even dropped the FPS even more. First I converted ALL map brushes to detail and converted the main walls of the buildings to become structural. This lead to a very long vis time and it wasn’t really simple as it should be. Then I experimented with areaportals and hint brushes but many tutorials describe optimizations inside non-leaked buildings. Here we have ruins with windows and open roofs (after a bombing raid It would be unrealistic to have roofs everywhere ). Then I found a tutorial by Detoeni (radskybox) which describes the caulked hull technique, I tried but even this didnt work well.
This tutorial / thread:
http://www.wolfensteinx.com/surface/forums/showthread.php?s=9cd4d47166cb88fe4fab064fe8b4fc7c&threadid=598&perpage=8&highlight=radskybox&pagenumber=4
He wrote there:
By having windows you can see from the leaf in side the room into the leafs outside the room. Unless the room is total sealed and unseen from the rest of the map the portals wont work. Hinting wont work for the same reasion. Both of thess tools need to be used with a solid visual blocking structures. By having the windows most of your leafs can see into each other, so the whole map will be drawn.
I don’t get it how to tell the Q3 Engine only to calc what I can see like in screenshot #1 or how to seal the rooms in an outdoor map. I know that improvement could be possible when I saw the transmitter final map with over 160 FPS constantly on the same machine here, a big outdoor map like mine. But how? How did they?
If anybody wants to take a look over the map (PK3ed, about 10MB now, including everything) please send me a PM and you’ll get the Link for download. It is a pain in the ass, even the scripting of the objectives was simpler than this and I thought scripting is hard