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Hi!

This tutorial will introduce to you the way I start working on a level in order to get the best results without hitting the 1,85 Gigabyte cap.

Disclaimer

I'm not a moderator or an administrator on these forums, I can't tell you what you are allowed to write and what not. But I would like to ask of you to not start a rant about optimizing the engine, recoding the engine in another language or implanting an alien code found on an ancient crystal so FPSC has the power of the Dunia engine. This thread is about hints and tricks to get the best results with the memory limits.

Tutorial

* Open your setup.ini and search for the line "systemmemorycapoff=0". (you can open your setup.ini with the windows editor (awesome little piece of software ). The setup.ini is located in the same folder as the FPSCreator .exe files.
Replace it with "systemmemorycapoff=1". This will allow the creator to get over the cap limit and doesn't halt the building process if (example) it uses a lot of memory while lightmapping.
This does NOT mean that you should create a lot larger levels now!

*A really memory consuming feature of FPSCreator is the lightmapping. Few of us still remember the euphoria when the lightmapsettings in the setup.ini where "discovered" a couple of years ago.
In fact, you do not need high resolution lightmaps. Now, before you shout "but this will reduce my visual quality" I would like to tell you that I use a low setting and I still get good critics on my lightmapping. My settings are:


This is absolutely enough and are the same settings used in my latest projects.

* A few of you tend to use high resolution textures and then add shadermaps to these. I advise against it!! A medium scaled object looks absolutely great with a 512*512 sized texture. Small objects can even look good with 128*128 or 256*256 resoluted textures. Adding giant texture maps to everything will simply reduce your performance. Large objects and detailed things (usually stuff with text on it or characters) should use 1024*1024 or in rare cases even larger...no compromises there Just remember that the quality of the texture is much more important than its resolution.

* Your polycount (for newcomers: a model with a lot of details has a lot of polygons) matters. More polygons, larger amount of lightmappingtextures, larger memoryconsumption. Think what models are needed and where it would be best to add lowpoly placeholders.
I would advice to learn the basics of modeling here so you can create some...lets say lowquality pipes to fill in places the player can see but can't go. Remember that planes, skyboxes and other illusions to create vivid levels are ment to be used!!

* Think ahead! This is the most important part of this tutorial. Get yourself an idea of what you want to have in your level, what is going to happen, what is necessary... you can even draw or write down your levelconcept. ( I don't do it, but it helps a lot of people I know). Now start mapping the necessary things first. Then add details until your level reaches a stable size (1,6 or 1,7 gigabyte...the lower the better)

* for outdoor ares: things that are far away should be low on details and should not have shadermaps on them. Outdoor maps need a lot of thinking out of the box and tricks to look good and work in FPSC. I would only advice these for advanced users.

Using a few dynamic objects here helps to keep the memorycap under the 1,85 gig but can drown your performance. Use billboards and planes aswell!

* Selfmade music and soundeffects can be horribly large. Check the scale of it under preferences and convert it (if necessary) in a smaller sized format.

There is not much I can add to this. If you know something else share it please

I hope this helps some of you and I hope my grammar isn't as horrible as I think it is sometimes.

Have a nice weekend!



-Wolf

Once again, well said. Nothing more to add from me.

(*Apart from. I suggest use these tips/options and build the game manually part by part, level by level.)

And you also have a good weekend, Wolf.

Nice tips man!

in over 1.85 level give me the error "impossible to open trasparent texture" it' s a multiplayer arena, without this and minimum details i can load it...

Thanks people...nice to see you still around Defy

@xhogen89x

Thats probably the issue... there are always some errors with the multiplayer mode.

I give you the checklist:

** Is there any dynamic object in this map, or any object that has a transparent texture (fences, windows...) if so: remove them.

** did you switch from multiplayer to singleplayer anytime?

** Do you use guns with transparent texture parts?

** Are you running any mod?

Other than that, I would advise to use the singleplayer mode.



-Wolf

And here I was thinking that the Dunia Engine was in-itself an inferior version of the FPSC engine...lol

Wolf - Great tips man...many thanks for sharing these...

~LK~

Hey Wolf. How you doing.
Making time to check in on forums when I can, its not as easy to find time as I would like while working on a new project (expanded apon redshift). Yet its good to read up on whats happening here.
If anyone wants to get a hold of me / msn- defy_rfs (at) hotmail (dot) com

I hope this thread explains alot for users looking for answers.
And I hope everyone has great success with 1.18.

I have a question about the lightmap quality settings. I use the following;

lightmapatten=16
lightmapmaxsize=-1
lightmapboost=4
lightmaptexsize=512
lightmapquality=16
lightmapblurmode=1
lightmapthreadmax=-1

How much of an impact will lowering the lightmaptexsize, while raising the lightmapattensize, have on my lightmap quality/game performance?

@Defy: I'm great! Thanks for asking


Set atten to 32 while doing it.

However, It really depends on your lightmapping. If you rely a lot on detailed shadows, I would not recommend it. If not, it really doesn't matter.

512 is rather large. I would never go over 256.



-Wolf

Ok, that's great, thanks for that. I don't really rely a lot on shadows, my game isn't one where shadows are all that important.

I'll change those 2 settings like you've suggested

I took a look at your game (seclusion) and examined the way you use lightmapping.

Apparently, you use a high ambience and bloom. That basically means you can lower your settings even more.

lightmapatten=16
lightmapmaxsize=-1
lightmapboost=4
lightmaptexsize=128
lightmapquality=32
lightmapblurmode=1
lightmapthreadmax=-1

try this Maybe it looks good!

**************

offtopic: Your sewer looks actually well designed. But it is the visual quality that drowns your game a bit. Why not taking a weekend kicking up the visuals and learning to handle a graphic program? (I would start with the crosshair )



-Wolf

My ambient is only set to 15, but I think I've got too many light sources in my game, especially in the sewer level.

TBH the lighting has been the one aspect of my game design that I've struggled the most to get right. I've tried to strike a balance between the ambient levels and the individual light sources, while at the same time, trying to maintain the atmosphere of each level.



Thanks, coming from you that means a lot I used NBT's sewer pack, but used my own brick texture, as I wanted them to resemble the old Victorian sewers underneath London. However, I do know that I need to make them darker, even though there's a lot of combat down there!

Another thing, I haven't really touched things like the hud, crosshair and menus etc, I've been concentrating on getting the actual level design right first. Once I'm happy with that aspect of the game, then I'll take a serious look at the other 'glue' that will hold the game together.

But anyway, I'll definately be taking on board all your advice, thanks very much

wolf!

Whenever I lower my lightmap resolution some of my entities glow very brightly. This is not a shader problem as I have tested with all different settings. It is due to a light map size lower then 512. But I cannot build my level with 512 because of the memory cap..

A very well insight tutorial wolf and hope people read it before they keep on posting the same request's for such info in the forums. as there are to many that keep on going over the same thing, Of Why this Why that how come this and how come that, you now what i mean.



Well i have a sound Tip to add, and that is use Mono sound recordings where possible, as this will reduce data of sound files by 50% or more.

Hello Wolf,

Thank you so much for sharing these excellent tips with us all (based on his own experience as a game developer using FPSC),which I believe will be very useful for many people on this forum including me as well.

"Experience is the teacher of all things." (Quotation)
Julius Caesar

Cheers.

Northern

that shouldn't happen. try keeping the size and lower the quality instead. Maybe that works.



Would be pretty useless if only I knew them Glad I can help.



-Wolf

Just wanted to point you guys in this directions:

http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=181943&b=21&msg=2260738#m2260738

This seems to only happen to the model pack 30 buildings and only a few of them. They don't have shaders on them, I can't seem to find out why it happens with 256 resolution.

I'm running a big outdoor map that when using 512 goes over the cap. I used a tutorial I found so that the game builds and tests. But it wont run the built game.

If anyone knows why this is happening please help me out!