Outdoor scenes are my specilty
Commense the tutoring.
Outdoor scenes are often very difficult for FPSC and it's typical style of building levels to handle. the way segments work, is that they're not combined when they're made into segments, they're just a bunch of squares sitting right next to each other, and since each one is usually around 12 triangles at minimum, it adds up. if you want a building face to be 10 segments long by 12 segments high, that's 10x12 segments, and it equals 1440 triangles. say you make an entire building out of that face, and it's 5760. and that's just for 4 big walls. make a roof on that, and it's another 1440, making it 7200 polygons just for 4 big walls with a roof.
Needless to say, this will look ugly as the texture is repeated 120 times on each wall, and there's no windows or dimension. adding windows to every segment will pretty much triple the polygon count on each wall, so let's count that as: 21600 triangles. assuming windows on every segment. a good level's maximum polycount should be around 80,000 without any enemies. you can read how many tris are in your map by looking at the little "p" number at the bottom of the screen, or if you're using v118, you can hit the "tab" key.
all of this can be avoided. I won't advise using invisible segments to make big walls around what you want and don't want to be rendered, but what if you can take that 21600 triangles and slice that down by using an entity building. a good entity building. perhaps cutting it to 4000-7000 triangles if the building is really detailed. that kind of building, use for foreground stuff that the player will see immediately, and be able to focus on. background buildings, however you can make yourself. find a seamless window texture, and make a box (easy) in any modeling program. write it a .fpe, put it in your entitybank along with the texture and the model's .x file. the box itself is only 12 triangles. the texture doesn't add any. being that this massive building has only as many triangles as a segment, ONE segment, you can use lots of them to create dimension.
HERE is a video example of an outdoor scene running great in FPSC in my game When Worlds Collide:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNMRfR0b0wY
now, I'll give you some example images, and we'll work out how I got them.
triangles: 72000.
average FPS rate v116: 40/40
average FPS rate V117: 60/60
this map is a rooftops map. the tops of the roofs are segments. the building walls are plains, so I think that makes them 2 triangles each. the other buildings that aren't detailed, they're entity buildings. the streets are kept low poly, but are also segments. I make sure to use them minimally. the entities are kept to boxy shapes to minimize polygons. the rooftop entry points are segments for better collision. enemies have not been added yet, but will be.
imageflock.com/img/1272671763.jpg[/img]
skype = isaacpreston. I want to talk to YOU
