How Big is too Big for a Map?

[Rapture]

I do know if a map is to large, like 600x600x600 or larger (Way past the default view clipping range which is 300 I think). It will crash the game intermittently.


For Optimization...

(1) The Size of map doesn't matter for the majority of people I believe. The game will care very little if it's 1x1 or 100x100. Unless like I stated above you start going past the View Clipping Range.

It's all the crap we fill up makes it so demanding.

(2) Don't have two lamps or more with "Shadows" ON, intersect each-other.

(3) Turn off most, if not all Light's "Alpha" to 0.

(4) I don't see a reason to splatter Decals everywhere. Especially if they are dark corridors, only use them for important areas or brightly lit places. It bloats the map to a ridiculous size.

(5) The game runs fine enough up to about 20-30ish objects colliding (Varies between each PC system) with each-other and the environment and if they have a simple Box or Cylinder collision. But anymore will cause the game's FPS to tank.

A common issue with map start-ups, the initial lag spike is all your objects falling a few centimeters and colliding with other objects.

(6) Polygons by themselves don't affect the game to much, it might be a problem when things like Shadows are being blocked by polygons, since the game has to calculate them dynamically.

I can't remember who, but someone had to copy a 256 Tris object over a thousand times in the same location to notice any frame drop. So that's like a quarter million polygon budget.



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What I can think off the top of my head that people may not be aware of.