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Is there a reasonable limit to the size of open areas?


Repper

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Pretty much any size (that you would do) is feasible, but whether or not it will be playable with any specific number of NPCs is a different question. :p

 

My question to you would be this... how would YOU like to run for 2 minutes straight in JK2 across a football field to get to an enemy? :p

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Well, GTK Terrain Manual mentions Q3 Terrain map which is 12K gameunits long and calls it the largest map ever, at that time anyways. (According to my calculations and I could be wrong, it's about 4 soccer fields long).

 

The problem with these large open maps are that they generate tremendous light data so that BSP filesize goes beyond 20-30 MB quite easily which is not good for a low end computer. And you would probably recieve the error anyway. Smth like "Exceeded maximum grid arrays". The only way to avoid that is to create vertex lit surfaces which are kinda ugly if you talking about realism (but in general okay for grass, sand,rock, basically terrain type textures). Plus the VIS. It's also the problem cuz everything is in the VIEW.

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xcom, the yavin_canyon map has a side length of more than 14.000 grid units (+430 meters) and a bsp-size of 17 MB

 

repper,

if you are not too generous with polygons on terrain, it should be feasible

 

but beware not using small textures on huge planes in very opened areas because these textures will loop in big amounts and it looks kind of ugly

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Part of that map is definetly vertex lit. That's why it's relatively small in size. Try to make a map like and use normal lightmaps for terrain. First, you'd need a week time to compile it, second - it will go beyond 20 MB. I guarantee you that. ;)

 

As for it being the largest map, I dunno. Could be.

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now where you say it, jep the whole canyon is probably vertex lighted, i'll definitely try it with vertex lighting on my canyon. I have tried it once with common lightning on a big canyon and it took a day finally with the error of exceeded memory :)

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