ok, i have a map emergency..........i asked people to review my map on this coming wednesday only my average fps rating in my map is 60. when i played my map the fps was constantly 60. when my friend played my map he got anything between 70-90 fps.

HOW DO I INCREASE THE FPS IN MY MAP AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE?????

would making everything structural help increase fps???
would adding in ambient lighting help increase fps????

i have a lot of models in my map and in my artistic opinion they are all necessary but if i have too i can get rid of 5 of them.....(my map is of a forest.......but i dont have it as a dense forest.......just so the tree leaves cover most of the sky from the ground)

HELP ME OUT!!!!!

one last thing.........when i compile i do
1)BSP-META....when that is finished i do
2)BSP-VIS FAST......when that is done i do
3)BSP-LIGHT FASTER.........then im done with my map


would i get a higher fps if i did the full complete.......
1) BSP-META-VIS-LIGHT-FILTER-BOUNCE 8 compile???????????

I don't know why you are worried with 60 fps. That's still a very good fps altogether, especially if you say you are already done detailing your map. Even 30 fps is very playable, after all.

What comes to compile, just make sure your map is not leaking (VIS is behaving ok). Otherwise use settings that make your map look good. That's the idea. Bounce 8 sounds a bit exaggerated, though.

And making everything structural would kill a good map, so it's hardly a solution. Just suggesting such a thing hints you have still some homework to do, what comes to the basics of mapping.

(1) Lassev is exactly right, 60 FPS is perfectly fine, even for a MP map with lots of players. Hey, if my newest map ran at 60 with 15 bots I'd be dancing. Some areas sit at 27 or so, but it's only one place, and it's still quite playable. The human eye operates at 24 FPS anyways.

(2) In-Radiant compiles suck. They're just barely scratching the surface of what q3map2 can do. They also don't apply to every map equally--sometimes -bounce 8 is stupid, sometimes it's great. But I can tell you this:

Run -VIS without the -fast switch. Yes, it'll take longer, but the -fast switch causes VIS to go more quickly by skipping stuff and doing a half-assed job. If you did a full VIS compile you'd probably see a jump in FPS right there.

Run -LIGHT with -fast instead of -faster. -fast makes LIGHT most effieicient (and decreases compile time significantly). -faster does for LIGHT what -fast does for VIS: makes it go faster at the expense of in-game quality. The lightmap might not have a significant effect on framerates, but it can affect it to an extent. Most in the form of dynamic lights, though.

(3) DO NOT MAKE EVERYTHING STRUCTURAL. That will throw your FPS into the dirt. What you need to do is make major walls, floors, and ceilings out of struct brushes, and make smaller interior brushes detail. The idea is to use struct brushes to form boundaries of every area of the map, because VIS draws boundaries of what the player can see based on structural brushes alone. (If you build two rooms completely sectioned off by a structural wall, you can't see from one room to the other in-game. But if the wall is detail, the game will still draw everything in both rooms.) For the most part, walls should be structural and smaller objects should all be detail brushes. Structural brushes should be only rough outlines, in simple geometric shapes...if you filter detail, models, and patches, you should be left with a bunch of connected boxes. You get into complicated situations if you have terrains, windows, big rooms with tons of little rooms adjoining, curved passages, etc...but the basic principle is the same: struct brushes are simple boundary outlines, detail brushes fill in the details. Proper use of detail brushes will affect FPS the most of all.

so should i make the mountain walls, tree models, and large river rocks structural or leave them detailed????????

should i make entities detailed? entities such as models, weapons, ammo, lights, nulls, teleporters, etc.?????

cool it on caffine;)

if the're md3s leve them but it bruished probley detail them

enities can't be detailed i think


if you want the vis to make more cuts use hint brushes

Entities are entities. They have no role in VIS process anyway, so it's all the same if you turn them into details in Radiant or not. It may affect how you filter them in editor, but it has no meaning in the compile process.

And please, please use the edit button. Double and triple posting are frowned upon.

Originally posted by JeeMonkey
so should i make the mountain walls, tree models, and large river rocks structural or leave them detailed????????
Those should probably be detail, if they're freestanding objects that you can see around. If they're large objects that block significant parts of the map from being seen, then they should be structural.

And entities CAN'T be made detail. They're effectively detail already--as lassev said, VIS ignores them.