10 réponses à ce sujet

[ColorsFade]

I'm wondering if it is advisable to set buildings (houses, etc.) as environmental objects for buildings that are not going to be used (doors are static, player never enters them). Would this improve performance in a city area that is fairly heavy with building-structures?

[andysks]

I have a pretty big area using many buildings and the only reason it sucked in performance is because of the city hak usage. Tchos' fix on the models fixed the problem though so in short, I don't think our computers have so much trouble with many buildings now, just as they can handle many more seeds now in comparison to when the game was new.

[Tchos]

Setting buildings as environmental objects has the unwanted effect of allowing the camera to pass through them, which will either cause the buildings to disappear if object fade is enabled on them, or will cause them to get in the way of the camera, making navigation difficult.  That can still be worked around, though, using an invisible object to block the camera from going behind it.

[Claudius33]

In addition arrows can be shot through environmental buildings. Keep it for a 'magic' city .

 

I have made quite a lot of large cities using placables without any performance issue. OnIy once I had to use environmental buildings in the active area because the city was so crowded that the path computing engine got totally lost.

 

However I systematically put all buildings out of the active area in environmental mode.

[Tchos]

I think that even for the complicated pathing you mention here, you could have marked the terrain under the building as non-walkable, which would provide a clean walkmesh without having to set them as environmental.  If there need to be usable doors in the building, then you can just leave a couple of terrain polygons set to walkable around the doors to be handled by the placeable's walkmesh, which would still greatly reduce the complexity of the walkmesh for pathing purposes.

[kamal_]

I'm wondering if it is advisable to set buildings (houses, etc.) as environmental objects for buildings that are not going to be used (doors are static, player never enters them). Would this improve performance in a city area that is fairly heavy with building-structures?

I'd suggest loading up Crimmor and just walking around. It likely has more objects in the city exteriors than yours do, so you can judge whether performance is acceptable. Then you can see in the toolset how things are.

 

As andy said, city hak is very bad for performance without the improvements made.

[Tchos]

As andy said, city hak is very bad for performance without the improvements made.

 

And bad even with them, depending on which buildings you use, since I only added LODs to a subset of the buildings in it -- the ones Andy was using in his city area.

[ColorsFade]

I use quite a few buildings from the City HAK. Those were the ones I was changing to environmental. 

 

I have three city areas for Scornubel. Two of them don't use much of the City HAK and I think they're okay. It's the 3rd area I'm concerned about, and I haven't baked it yet. Still some work to do. 

[Tchos]

I don't expect changing placeables without LOD meshes to environmental will have any noticeable effect on the area's performance.

[ColorsFade]

Okay, thanks Tchos. That's kind of what I figured, but wanted to ask the pros. 

 

 

I guess I'll have to bake it and see how it goes, and if those buildings become an issue I might have to go with fewer of them. I still want to keep a couple because they are really nice and lead into some areas for the players. But if it makes a difference in performance then reducing their count will have to be considered. 

[ColorsFade]

Well, I managed to bake two of the areas (still re-baking, as they're far from perfect in the walkmesh), and one of the areas has several of the City HAK houses in it, and the performance was great. Now, this is without NPC's walking around yet, but at least on it's own the area performed fine. 

The third area has the most buildings, but I just went and removed about half the City HAK ones. I'm going to bake it in its current state and see how it performs. If all goes well then it's just a matter of fine-tuning the walkmesh and finishing the decoration.