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FPSC Classic Product Chat / Outdoor Worries

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Jack Attack
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Posted: 14th Jan 2009 22:13
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I'm thinking of creating a large outdoor street game. Lets say I use the whole grid map over maybe one or two layers. Whats the lag going to be like? is it a large size build .exe (slow downloads)? Can you still see the 'ether' over walls? Anybody had any experience of building something like this. Would an idea maybe be to build the city into levels to access parts of the city to improve load speeds etc etc or any other suggestions.

Can anyone suggest where I can get the decent city pack from such great games like 'He is Coming' or 'Cry of the Infected' by Cyborg Arm Ganes, or have they used model pack 16?

Thanks for any suggestions.
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AaronG
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Posted: 14th Jan 2009 22:19 Edited at: 14th Jan 2009 22:19
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Okay, first off YES it will be laggy. What does ether over the walls mean? The build size depends on how much media is in the level, and how many levels it is. It could be 60mb, it could be 260 mb. Lastly, it would be pointless to make your city in seperate "levels" because you can't navigate BACK one level.

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Jack Attack
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Posted: 14th Jan 2009 22:25
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Cheers for the reply, by ether I mean where you can see the 'nothingness' behind walls if no floors (such as grass) have been layed down. Say you build a square of walls, put a grey floor down in the square and plonk a 3 storey buiding in the middle of it. When you look out of the window on the 3rd storey, you can see over the wall where there is no floor, therefore the 'ether'. Is there away round this or do you just have to put down a load of flooring? Thinking about it, can you use the automatic floors tickbox when building the game?
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Nickydude
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Posted: 14th Jan 2009 22:38 Edited at: 14th Jan 2009 22:39
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Doing a large outdoor level will lag very badly, and unless you know what you're doing and and can pull of various tricks to speed it up then you will get frustrated, especially as soon as you put enemies into your level. Take a look here: http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=136232&b=35.

Edit: Oops, looks like you already have!

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Nickydude
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Posted: 14th Jan 2009 22:46 Edited at: 14th Jan 2009 22:46
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*Double post*

All the town stuff was many, many models bought / scavenged from all across the forum, the model packs and the store. For example the road was done by Ross tra damus (free Road Rage Pack), the large buildings where from the store (ZbVld), the green trees are from Rolf (if I remember correctly), the dead tree and boxes where from the store.

Gather while you can, it will come in handy sooner or later.

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TGPEG
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Posted: 14th Jan 2009 22:47
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The idea (or at least as I got it) is to create the level in such a way that it is impossible to see the whole level at once. Use wall segments wherever possible to fool the engine into culling the polys behind it. The best way to do this is to play the level with the [ and ] buttons to determine where the greater concentrations of polys are and the best places to put barriers of wall segments to make the engine cull them. Then you optimise the game. Remove anything which the user doesn't see such as floors behind walls, interior walls in any of the buildings you make etc.

[center]
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Jack Attack
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Posted: 14th Jan 2009 22:47
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Thanks for the info folks, as you can probably tell I'm not aware of the 'various tricks to speed it'. I will be back.
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Hockeykid
DBPro Tool Maker
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Posted: 14th Jan 2009 23:44
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Quote: "Take a look here: http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=136232&b=35."


nickydude when i player he is coming i got 4 fps (i hit tab)

]
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Nickydude
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Posted: 14th Jan 2009 23:48
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Yes, there are slowness issues. I'll rebuild this in either X10 or the migration version (or both!).

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gorba flamingo
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Posted: 15th Jan 2009 00:21
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check out my thread in the WIP it has some large outdoor scenes (urban and natural) and may help you.

remember this
- if the player does not notice an entity when running past it should it be there?
- entity's do not hide whats behind em
- and make ur level on multiple levels to
a, make it hard to go back
b, hide entity's in large areas

[url=http://profile.mygamercard.net/gorbafletch]
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Nomad Soul
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Posted: 15th Jan 2009 00:50
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Nickydude is right.

When you think outdoor levels in FPSC. Think Kingpin which is also a BSP based game engine. You can make convincing outdoor environments like 'he is coming' but you need to limit the draw distance.

Now if you really wanted to push the outdoor possibilities of FPSC you could implement a LOD system by having higher poly models being spawned in close proximity and low poly versions in the distance. This would take a considerable amount of work both in creating the extra models and setting up all the model spawning but its possible.

There's a bunch of other tricks you could use like having parts of the level where a door closes behind you or something and dynamically destroy everthing prior to that part of the level.

Basically outdoor scenes in FPSC require you to think outside of the box if you'll excuse the pun. Nickydude did a great job with his game so it can be done.
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