Advanced Map Optimizing (outdoor maps)

[legacy-TseTse]

OK, here's a couple questions pertaining mostly to OUTDOOR maps, although they arent just outdoor issues...

* the dangling AVP

with outdoors, we gotta rely on the anti-portal volumes considerably.

what are the bugs with these, if any? can they properly intersect with each other? with other stuff? what's the best usage and at what point are we just adding too many?

* collisions (static mesh)

for a lot of detailed stuff, i wonder what the most optimized collission settings (mesh) could/should be. im talking about COL settings on existing mesh, not independent COL objects (although the same questions pertain to them).

what's the impact and importance of perhaps dropping them on everything besides stopping players?

im killing col completely on a lot of things, just wondering with all the settings if there's a nice "compromise" state that i should know about for things like trees.

* water (bsp vs mesh)

i have simple bsp planes for large water blocks, which intersect my terrain. is this best?

how is performance compared to a much higher poly mesh with a simple texture added?

ive been told that a simple BSP intersecting a terrain is actually poor performance cmpared to even a high poly mesh which hugs that terrain. is this true?

* setting occlusions

im a newbie with occlusions and such. im particularly wondering if there's anything slick i can do with my terrains to speed things up.

what are the fastest settings for terrains? is "defauilt" much different than "none"? is "default" sound occlusion the best compromise? (btw, certainly doesnt seem to work at all! lmao)

[legacy-TseTse]

* Terrain Sector Size

oh, how could i forget? :D

this appears to be the all-important setting for doing proper terrain tweaking. my experience shows it is first and foremost directly impacting how big the "chunks" are of terrain that are being rendered. so, if you want to kill the weird "blinking" of whole chunks of terrain in the background, fiddle with that setting.

however, im wondering about all the aspects of this variable. for example, i WANT to have more of my terrain vanish faster, in some situations.

is bringing that value down to 8 or 16 really going to positively impact performance, say with lots of breaks in visibility and some strong fog?

"stats render" helps for testing...

[legacy-Bonehed316]

okay, well. im not a terrain guy myself, but lets see what i can answer.

anitportals are your best bet with outdoor maps, as youve said. ive heard AP can be sheets, but ive never done it myself. and of course they have to be in subtracted space at least a tiny bit. even just a small corner. and you cant resize antiportals. they can intersect each other without problems, but remember the rules of AP when it comes to occluding things. the item has to be 100% covered by ONE AP. someone also told me that they occlude by sihlouette, so whatever that means, lol. collisions are pretty big, use simple collisions as much as you can. and make sure the simple LINE collisions are on, because those are the worst, in my experiences. when you shoot, the mesh has to be calculated for the shot, so keep that simple. you can use blocking volumes and turn off collisoins, but i havent really noticed much different in my own experiences, though i could see how it would really help. blocking volumes dont cut bsp, and so there is no real limit to their usage.

for water, you may want to turn those planes into semi solids or non solids, but be careful there. meshes are safest. just be sure to turn shadowcast off.

occluding your terrain, be sure and use the visability tool as MUCH AS YOU CAN. if im right, a 256x256 terrain adds about 65k polys to the map, reguardless of the terrain size.

[legacy-BabyNuke]

Use meshes for water? (I suppose it's possible with an xProcMesh actor to make good water) I'd go for fluidsurfaceinfo actors then ;)

[legacy-TseTse]

Originally posted by Bonehed316
anitportals are your best bet with outdoor maps, as youve said. ive heard AP can be sheets, but ive never done it myself. and of course they have to be in subtracted space at least a tiny bit. even just a small corner. and you cant resize antiportals.

yea, i knew about resizing... but i didnt know that ap VOLUMES had to be intersected with proper BSP within the map area (instead of, say, under a terrain intersecting nothing).

will have to do some tests there...

as for meshes for water, absotelutely. fluidsurface seems to be the least efficient system, honestly. i may be wrong, but that's a whole lot of excess stuff if you just want simple surface.

non-solid bsp plane seems very strong option, as long as it doesnt translate into thousands of polys for rendering when nestled against terrain (which is my technical question).

[legacy-Bonehed316]

if your non solid plane is just a square, there wotn be thousands of polys. or if you need an irregular shape, a few cubes. thats the thing about a fluid surface, if you have weird shapes (like for a U shaped lake), you either need a big fluidsurface, or to use a sheet. the former is very innefecient.

[legacy-P1nky]

I think the best thing is to use a 128x128 size heightmap to start off with.

A 256x256 heightmap is 65,000 polies
A 128x128 heightmap is only 16,000 polies

If you edit the terrain carefully enough, you cant tell the difference between the two, except that your FPS will be way higher with a 128x128 heightmap.
Then just build your terrain with FPS in mind, and use a few anti portals.

And as for water, you can set the amount of polies in your fluidsurface. I just set it to about 16x16 for really big or really small areas and turn the Waveheight down pretty low to like 0.25

[legacy-Noz]

Uhm, i have my AP's intersecting nothing and they work fine. Rmode 1 is your friend.

[legacy-TseTse]

ok... 1st of all, folks... dont make claims your wallet cant pay for. :D

" If you edit the terrain carefully enough, you cant tell the difference between the two, except that your FPS will be way higher with a 128x128 heightmap. "

that would be a really good example. you most certainly CAN, and i say that as a former tribes mapper who lives for heightmaps... and will be happy when unreal handles 1024x1024 more efficiently with auto-occluding terraing instead of having to place APV...

no, you dont need 1024 in most cases, but if you are doing proper outdoor mapping and really interested in DETAIL... sorry, but 128x128 just doesnt cut it in my experience. in fact, i often rely on a 2nd partially visible "background" terrain even at 256.

:D hehehehe

anyways, my question about the water isnt merely a newbie question. ive been told by somebody very reputable that a simple square ... bsp... PLANE... can actually get rendered like a bazillion poly bsp plane. im going to test with the rendering stats running later. i just thought it one of a several subjects worth tossing out... and it does seem strange...

i.e. what's most efficient for a simple water layer?

if the question were THAT easy to answer, we wouldnt have 3 answers on this thread thus far...

[legacy-P1nky]

Originally posted by TseTse
ok... 1st of all, folks... dont make claims your wallet cant pay for. :D

Whatever you say man.
I am using 128x128 heightmap terrain and it looks better than most terrains I have seen.
Sure I have to edit the terrain vertex by vertex in some areas, but it definately pays off in the end.

I am going for realistic terrain, and you are probably going for rolling hills.

[legacy-mcshlong]

So whats the end results of this thread? Can we do the 1024x1024 map successfully? Whats the end result on the FPS? Do we have a demo of it for us to try?

Wazzzza upppp?

[legacy-stevenho]

TseTse, a 1024x1024 heightmap? Do you realize this equals over one MILLION POLYS? As for your water surface question, use a sheet added with the Add Special Brush button, it gives you the choice of the brush type you create, though for some reason I believe , added this way, it is always a non-solid brush. To measure how the engine treats this brush in the game, type stat render in the console, and one of the many reading it gives you are BSP polys. No more guessing!

[Angel_Mapper]

Holy 5 month thread bump Batman! :bulb:

[legacy-Bonehed316]

actually, its 2,093,058 polys for a 1024^2 heightmap, lol.

http://users.stargate.net/~amay/terrain.jpg

as you can see, with this 4x4 heightmap, it produces 16 vertices and 18 polys. 2(n-1)^2. for a 256^2 heightmap, 130,050. thats a LOT. thats why we say use a 128^2 heightmap if possible. only 32,258 polys.

[-=¤willhaven¤=-]

dont forget. cull distance works on antiportal volumes as well :)

and putting a simple block of BSP under the terrain (say a semisolid) thats NOT set to be an antiportal will give that area occlusion over the network

so use a BSP block set to unlit/invisible with an antiportal VOLUME/ACTOR and youll get the most flexibility and performance out of it

as far as collision goes. with UT2K3, simplified karma AND player collision helps loads. checking the number of karma primitives in the simplified collision is a good thing too. if you've got very few... great. if you have like 30 primitives... BAD.

i usually look at my mesh in the editor and decide how many boxes/primitives i want it to be. then i use the 2d shape editor and extrude X# of boxes. then i vertex edit them to fit the mesh but i leave a 1 unit gap between each block or shape. then when you right click/save brush as collision... it will give you a VERY simple and very optimized collision that will be faster and less snaggy than not having simplified collision.

i did the simplified collisions for the ion turret base. the original had 30-some primitives. :bulb:

i cut it down to 7 :D

being onsite has great benefits. its a crash course in leaning optimization as we have steve and daniel hovering over you making you optimize your meshes and maps fully.

[Angel_Mapper]

I repeat. This thread is 5 months old. :p

Go to bed Will, it's like 2 over there. :D

[legacy-mcshlong]

But the topic is still a valid one. And interesting too. Alot of the old threads in this forum read like a how too for UEd. Even though I have watched all of Buzz tuts and read all of angels good tuts, I still use the search button on this forum alot too.

[legacy-\/\/0RF]

Originally posted by willhaven
so use a BSP block set to unlit/invisible with an antiportal VOLUME/ACTOR and youll get the most flexibility and performance out of it
I don't understand what this means. Are you adding two blocks under the terrain or are you adding an AP actor to the BSP block?

We were always told that BSP no longer occluded as of 2003+ builds so this is a source of great confusion for me.

[legacy-Bonehed316]

they dont occlude. but they DO block sight, lol. i dont think the engine counts the terrain when it does the relevance checks. and antiportals alone, i dont think, will cause an object to fail the relevance test during replication. so the idea is to add a antiportal which works well offline, and a big bsp block which works well online. the bsp, especially if its a semisolid, wont hurt performance, may not even be rendered if its inside the AP, and will block anything behind it from being replicated, saving bandwidth, etc. and offline, the AP will occlude everything behind it. again, i dont think terrain has any effect on occlusion or replication.

also remember you can have a cull distance on an AP actor. :)

[-=¤willhaven¤=-]

they dont occlude meshes or other BSP... but they do occlude network actors over the internet. (bsp blocks that is)


the problem is is that antiportal volume actors DONT occlude players over the network. but it occludes meshes and stuff

the problem with BSP is it doesnt work well as an antiportal. but it occludes network stuff.

so its best to have both

[legacy-Original9]

What about fog?

[legacy-Qantourisc]

well i know a funny thing about terains, a 512X512 size terain doesn't eat half the power, then when i place a bot on it !...

Well on my pc though ;p

[legacy-\/\/0RF]

Originally posted by willhaven
they dont occlude meshes or other BSP... but they do occlude network actors over the internet. (bsp blocks that is)


the problem is is that antiportal volume actors DONT occlude players over the network. but it occludes meshes and stuff

the problem with BSP is it doesnt work well as an antiportal. but it occludes network stuff.

so its best to have both
So will, how do you accomplish this? Do you add identical cubes of bsp and AP to the same space under the terrain (I know, the AP needs to stick out into subtracted space)? Or do you put two separate blocks next to each other?

/ultra-n00b... but if I can learn this stuff maybe UEd3 won't be so daunting... I have to keep reminding myself what a PITA semi-solids were...

[-=¤willhaven¤=-]

they can be different shapes.

but its usually wise to use the same brush and just move the antiportal actor out into space 1-4 units.