MAP SIZE

[penguinman]

I dont want to learn how to make maps unless I know I can make a map at least 15km long and 15kmwide can u make a map this big.

Im trying to expand upon "mogadishu leave no one behind" map. Also the 15km would be completly city. would that make to much lag.

[m21man]

would that make to much lag

Yes. People already bitch about Tatu, and AFAIK that city is 2km x 1km.

I dont want to learn how to make maps unless I know I can make a map at least 15km long and 15kmwide can u make a map this big.

You can make and use islands at sizes up to 51.2km x 51.2km .

[shinraiden]

I have a working 102km sample with the two Tonal islands in opposite corners, see the 1.96 bugs thread in the troubleshooting forum at the BIS forums for some vids on the engine bugs preventing it's practical usability and thus release, along with the BAS approval et. al. Takes 5 to 20+ minutes to fly depending on your vehicle. vids here.

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There was some extensive discussion with Nagual and othere in various places about how to reduce lag in city settings, specifically relating to the development of Tatu and Tonal.

The first thing to consider is "do you plan to actively use all 15km sq?" Frankly, there is no mission that does, even the CTI ones. Here's why, it's because the squad-based focus of OFP and the resulting view of the immediate action area, even with large-scale enhancements like CTI and COC:CE still focus on the individual squad, and not on a company or battalion hq perspective.

Furthermore due to the issues of AI collision scrambling in builtup areas, it's impractical to build properly aggressive swarming scenarios, the only thing that is reliable is where the AI stand around being stupid pretending to hold a location. It's a necessary compromise because of the engine limits.

Based on that, do you really need to model the entire city? The old Sgt. Gunnery's Mogadishu map is a good example of a reasonablely sized section of the city with low lag, a basic airport, and space to do other stuff. Agreed, it's certainly lacking in detail in a lot of areas, but look at the basic model or idea of how it is put together in terms of usability.

Secondly, there is the issue of object count. If you look closely at tonal, you'll notice that there was a number of things done to minimize this. To reduce complexity, buildings such as the slum huts were structurally minimized as they were there for environment, not 'real' usage. Where possible, they were combined into multiple groupings like a forest. A forest reduces one area of system load because it is only '1' object. It also makes map development simpler.

Third a lot of the remaining environment is handled by the textures. Next time you fire up Tonal, walk around and look at all the details. When you run a mission, you aren't conciously aware of everything, but it affects you subconciously to build the environment.

Fourth, the user can make or break the map by his machine specs. If you as the mod developer don't properly add decent LOD scaling, and if the user coorespondingly doesn't set his display settings to take advantage of that LOD scaling, visual quality will be really good, at the cost of utterly crapped FPS.

Fifth, back to textures. A lot of the detail that could be modeled would best be served by more detailed textures, especially in secondary or auxilary buildings. If you can integrate it into a core block without it looking like crap, you can save the polys that would otherwise bloat from all the details.