Special Limitations of terrain?

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Chrysaor

Chrysaor

Lord of the Pants
Nov 3, 2001
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Is there any reason why my terrain area in my new map should have even lower poly/node counts then the rest of the map? Most of the map stays around 150, but the outside area drops to 120 average, can I increase this without performance problems?

(hey no performance problem jokes either :p)
 
Shin

Shin

Ethical Illusionz
Aug 29, 2001
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Originally posted by Chrysaor


(hey no performance problem jokes either :p)
Click to expand...


LMAO...drat you got me there :p ...

Sure you can increase it but you have make sure it stays below 200 minumum, the higher the polycount the more yikes your PC wil say!! :p . I think 300 is the max you shouldnt cross that line ;) .
 
Chrysaor

Chrysaor

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WEll, i should be fine then. Now to make sure it looks nice...

Hey what about plants? Do all those meshes slow it down if i've got like say, 20 plants in view?
 
Twrecks

Twrecks

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Mar 6, 2000
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Big time.
Any extra sprites will slow you down, even pickups.
Try to keep them to a minimum. Problem is the rendering engine has to calculate those extra sprites even at long distances.
If you aren't sure, type "STAT FPS" in the console and see how it hits your performance. In Unreal1 they tried for a max count of 6 in view (more can be in a common zone I haven't tested the limits)
"TIMEDEMO 1" ("timedemo 0" turns it off) gives you your FPS so you can get a base idea of what slows you down by adding and removing stuff.
BTW, typing stat fps again will turn off the fps display at the bottom of the screen.
Another useful tool is "STAT OCCLUSION". Keep your unseen raytraced polys below 15% (occlusion rate) and you should be fine, lower than 10% and there seems to be no significant CPU hit.
 
Hourences

Hourences

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stat mesh could be usefull too
in my new map i got a small jungle room with 30 plants, and that still seem to run kinda fine, the fps drop but not that much, ive heard you should stay under 4000 meshpolys for sure, and 50000 is the max ut can make i thought, or at least at that moment your pc will prolyl stop doing what it suppose to do :p
 
Varpu

Varpu

Novice Nali City Reviewer
May 21, 2001
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Usually it is not the poly-count that makes terrains hard to do. I have found the BSP stuff more challenging as terrains tend to have a lot of oddly slanted surfaces. These in turn generate a lot of BSP cuts which in turn are calling for more problems.

The BSP errors are not easy to avoid but fortunately there are some things You can do:

Take a look at Your terrain with the BSP cut view; if You see any triangles that have very different colour than their surrounding, You could try to eliminate them by moving one of their vertices. Remember the 16 wu grid. Rebuild geometry after each "correction" to see how it affects the cuts. It is a good idea to have the objects grouped (The big G-tool) to shorten compilation time by eliminiting other stuff. Note that You NEVER get completely rid of the BSP stuff but You can make it as smooth as possible.

Make the terrain from smaller units; a large 32 x 32 drid will have BSP holes whilst making a 4 x 4 grid brush is hard to embed one.
 
Chrysaor

Chrysaor

Lord of the Pants
Nov 3, 2001
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Ya, i've got this one poly that acts like a fakebackdrop on itself, then when i align it to floor or something it's all weird colors and stuff, i haven't figured that one out yet.
I only knew about stat fps, i'll have to give those others a try. :-D

I never find out all this techical stuff, all i gots to do is ask the right ppl i guess :D
 
Hourences

Hourences

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STAT ACTOR
STAT CACHE
STAT CLIP
STAT FILTER
STAT FPS
STAT GAME
STAT GLOBAL
STAT HARDWARE
STAT ILLUM
STAT LIGHT
STAT MESH
STAT POLYC
STAT POLYV
STAT REJECT
STAT OCCLUSION
STAT SOFT
STAT SPAN
STAT ZONE

note that some of them dont really seem to work :D
 
Astyanax

Astyanax

GotoState('Coding');
Nov 3, 2001
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Voor jou een vraag, voor mij een weet.
Originally posted by Chrysaor
WEll, i should be fine then. Now to make sure it looks nice...

Hey what about plants? Do all those meshes slow it down if i've got like say, 20 plants in view?
Click to expand...

Remember CTF-cowsCowsCOWS, that map that was intended to be bad and a framerate killer? I found out that, with an average polycount of 30, you could have about 80 cows running around through the grasslands without too much slowdown. However don't try playing with 300 cows, that REALLY SUCKS!

BTW, can u imagine what pain it was to edit a map with 300 cows in it? Let's see, in top view you could see the wireframes of 300 cows, plus there were 2 creaturefactories (one at each side of the ditch that seperated the grasslands) with each 16 spawnpoints, so from each cow there were logical connections going to 16 spawnpoints and 1 creaturefactory; that makes 5100 red lines! DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!
 
StoneViper

StoneViper

you can call me Mike
Nov 3, 2001
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Originally posted by Astyanax


BTW, can u imagine what pain it was to edit a map with 300 cows in it? Let's see, in top view you could see the wireframes of 300 cows, plus there were 2 creaturefactories (one at each side of the ditch that seperated the grasslands) with each 16 spawnpoints, so from each cow there were logical connections going to 16 spawnpoints and 1 creaturefactory; that makes 5100 red lines! DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!
Click to expand...

L O L!:lol:
 
Hourences

Hourences

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http://users.pandora.be/Hourences/CTF-IMGHEY.zip

try my 1337 map wich rocks :D

also notice

-if your pc chrashes you do not know me
-you never heard of me
-you cannot sue me
-i wont pay the repaircosts for your pc
-also do not use longer then 10 sec :D

and as for real, the map is basicly a very ghey cube with discolights and a crategenerator in the middle, with other words, the map will create new crates until your pc chrashes, wich will prolly somewhere by 50000 crate polys, and by that time you got a few 1000 crates in view :)
each second 1 crate multiplies himself in 8 new crates, the next second you have 8*8=64, and so on .... this map WILL chrash:D
 
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