Hi, I'm new to mapping for Empires being more used to FPS games like TF2 and for more close-quarters RTS/FPS stuff like Natural Selection. I'm mainly worried about optimisation, Empires being so big in scale and so wide open with few vis blockers. Height: Can anyone recommend a good height for my map as I'm building it. I want the Comm to be able to see at least the starting base area without having to pan around, but I don't want there to be unneccessary space at the top of the map if I can help it. Size: Right now I have laid down 5x5 4096 floor 'tiles' which roughly correspond to areas of the map. I am aiming for something around the size of emp_cyclopean, does that sound like I am around the right size? Vis blockers and optimisation techniques: How important is it to place mountains and buildings in Empires to optimise? I notice a lot of maps in Empires work fine with mostly flat terrain. Does fogging handle the bulk of forcing unneeded brushwork to remain undrawn, or do you need to pay special attention to visblocking (as you do with more detailed environments)? Also, do most mappers tend to avoid using large brushes that cover the whole map. Is is ok to have the skybox as one massive brush or do you need to break it up into sections (what I call tiles). For the floor is it fine to have a massive ground brush and build displacements with visblockers on top of that, or is my 'tile' approach going to work better? Thanks in advance for any tips you can give.
Most maps use up most of the full hammer grid space in XY directions. For skybox height just test it until your comm view is at a comfortable height. Dont worry about having a huge space in the sky, if you fill it with a func_visculster entity it will help with compile time and rendering. Look at valve wiki to read up on how to use visclusters. For optimisation, if you plan on having a lot of detail then you should make sure your detailed areas are blocked off with hills with nodraw blocks inside them and hint brushes to aid visibility rendering. If your map is a lot simpler you can get away with having the map entirely open. For example dusstorm has almost zero blocking between areas and whichever direction you face will draw the entire map in front of you. It limits visibility with the max view distance set in the fog controller entity, and hides the cutoff with fog and dustcloud entities. If you know how your map is goign to be layed out in terms of visibility you might want to consider decompiling a similar map and seeing how it has been arranged for optimisation. Bear in mind some maps appear poorly optimised but still run well because they are fairly simple. For example cyclopean has almost no visblocking between areas so much of the map is drawn, and FPS is still OK even though it has reasonably detailed structures like the city, bridges and NW areas. Dont worry about using huge sky and nodraw brushes because the compiler splits them up naturally anyway.
Height: Somewhere between 6000-8000. 10,000 is too high, as the com can then zoom out so far that the players stop rendering. Also, if you are playing with fog, 12,000 z far limit (or whatever it is called, limits visibility like how mvalley has limited visibility) is a good distance to start with. Just throwin it out there, cause it's annoying to have to compile a large open map 3~ times to get fog almost where you want it.
Thanks for that. I think I've got a good idea of the scale of Empires maps now. Work has already started.
Pending certain developments within the team, I'm no longer working on the development for ND, so I decided to do some dev work for personal projects instead; this being one of them. As for when it's coming out, as we've said on the forums there should be an announcement regarding that this month or the next (again pending those 'developments' I mentioned).
that was what i was thinking when i typed waht i typed, its strange really how i ended up with that, but you are correct
bear in mind that your skybox should be based on elevations of the map as well... meaning, if you have an upper area(s) of the map that is 2-3000 units higher than other parts then you should create your 10000 units of 'comm view' from that point which would put your skybox at 13000 units from the lowest part of your map. This allows comms to not feel zoomed in when they click on the minimap to a higher area.
