As the title states this is not the official Helena thread but if you share any interest with creating levels working out level design etc you do want to follow this project.
Helena is a mod directed by AGP, you can find the original thread here!
This thread was created for compensating the many other things in life besides mod development. And to keep the updates more consistent, anyways hope you like what you see and feel free to leave a comment on what you think regarding the mod.
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Here's a picture of the Trading/Research area.
As this map story wise represents the wealth and rank of the family I wanted it to look luxurous yet a bit dirty as if the family didn't really care that much of what other people thought of them. Anyways, the layout of the map is fairly simple. Before entering the actual map there's two rooms you walk through, these are there to make the transaction from the previous map more smooth and pleasant to go through. At first I had no doors sealing the rooms of causing a rather large performance loss, I will explain how I fixed that now.
The green cone represents the player and all the objects being rendered in at once. As you might be able to tell this is a bit too much so something has to be done about it. Now one way to fix it would be corners but adding corners sealing of parts of the map would change the entire layout of the map and make the rooms feel more apart. So what else can I do, well Fog can actually improve performance as it limits the players line of site, although it wouldn't make sense to have that much fog/dust in the map as it is still being taken care of. So what's left, well actually simple doors. Instead of doing anything of the following I put doors in the door frames as well as removing some lights or disabling the "casting shadows" option. Doing this boosted the overall framerate so optimizing is definitely worth it.
Here's a video for ya: