Importance of zoning.

[Seco_In_The_Bushes]

Mayhem, If your hallways are oddly shaped, you can always subtract a thin square and put the sheet inside of that.

 

[RigorMortis]

Re: Re: Not quite...

Originally posted by StoneViper


...always use the smallest opening between two area as the place for zoneportals.

if you want to zone off the area you dont just dop the smallest opening... you have to do all openings between two areas... even the big ones. otherwise its still connected... ya dig?

 

[StoneViper]

Re: Re: Re: Not quite...

Originally posted by RigorMortis


if you want to zone off the area you dont just dop the smallest opening... you have to do all openings between two areas... even the big ones. otherwise its still connected... ya dig?

maybe you shouldn't be zoning off that area then. maybe it doesn't need to be zoned off. The area is an undivided room[/i]. Should you divide that room, it should be with brushes, not with zoneportals.

 

[Doc_EDo]

Hmm...

Originally posted by StoneViper


maybe you shouldn't be zoning off that area then. maybe it doesn't need to be zoned off. The area is an undivided room[/i]. Should you divide that room, it should be with brushes, not with zoneportals.

They were large!!! No small openings.
If you zone something you can't see, like behind the mountain or so, the rendering engine doesn't need to 'think' about that area while you don't look at it...And my map runs faster now...

Look at AS-HighSpeed.
That map has huge zone portals...

 

[Bot_40]

The only reason HighSpeed is zoned like that is so that when you fall off the train, you get killed. And also it is zoned down the length of the train so that each zone has it's own name so that if you say something to your team-mates it shows the zone name in the chat window.

 

[Bot_40]

And if you still think that large zone portals speed up the game, read this page:
http://unreal.epicgames.com/Zones.htm

Or if you are lazy, here's the important bit:

For zones whose purpose is only to speed up the engine, your goal is to divide your level up into zones while introducing portals whose overall area is as small as possible. The smaller the portals, the less work the engine must do to process the portals. Therefore, we place our portals in passageways which naturally separate large areas, such as doorways and hallways. This approach causes the level to be divided up well, without adding too much portal area.

There is no benefit (and often a performance penalty) to placing portals in the middle of large rooms. These huge portals usually eat up more CPU time being processed than they save. Stick portals in doorways, hallways, and other narrow passages.

And that's straight from Epic who made the goddam engine

 

[Doc_EDo]

No I wasn't lazy

Thx. It fooled me.

 

[GoldenMouse]

Originally posted by ]BloodForge[
Thank all of you for the input. Oh and Golden Mouse thats a really good point about the team DM. I never even thought about that. I will be posting my first map(2nd map,first public) hopefully this weekend in the playtesting forum so keep an eye out for it. Any input will be GREATLY appreciated.

lookin forward to it