Gestalt on 9/7/2005 at 14:24
Quote Posted by OrbWeaver
You might try making the high-up torches into OmniNoShadows, as there are no shadow-casting objects nearby and the player cannot walk near them. That will take at least three shadow-casters out of the equation (just looking at the screenshot).
I tried it, but the BSP stuff underneath the light looks really wrong when it doesn't cast a shadow. The framerate is actually a bit better than what I get in most of the OMs if I don't add all the grass meshes, so I don't think the lighting is necessarily a problem.
I might shut off another one of the torch lights to make it look less symmetrical and a bit more run down, though.
Ziemanskye on 9/7/2005 at 14:32
Just another thing to suggest, though it can take a bit of playing with and still doesn't always work, is that you can use *NoShadow lights and play with zone portals to stop the light showing through walls. Probably less use in this specific case because of the openness of the place.
Could play with the light damping setting too, can make for some good atmospheric lights that don't actully light all that much up.
And another odd tip for frame-rate increases is not to use the FakeBackdrop flag on sky areas - you can use the BF texture instead. It's not much of an improvement from what I remember, though someone (I think it was Komag) mentioned that you can walk right through FakeBackdrop.
Gestalt on 10/7/2005 at 04:17
BF texture?
Komag on 10/7/2005 at 05:50
The "blank" texture, which is a guy's skin in the editor
Crispy on 10/7/2005 at 09:41
Quote Posted by Gestalt
The level's mostly underground except for this starting area, so adding more detail to the skybox would probably be a waste.
This comment just triggered a crazy idea. How easy would it be to use trigger scripts to remove the skybox when the player goes far enough underground that they'll never see it? (And replace it again if they go back up of course.) I haven't actually touched skyboxes yet, but I've read up on how they work and it seems to me this could be a useful optimisation for when you're underground.
Regarding static meshes - from what I understand, static meshes basically are geometry instancing. It would work with level-of-detail (LOD) to some degree, as long as you only had a few detail levels (say, close/far/really far) - you'd just have to instance each level of detail separately.
rujuro on 10/7/2005 at 17:49
Should be able to set the objects in the skybox to outofworld->true based on a volume trigger. I'm doing that with some of the larger elements of my mission once you travel inside (a large mountain and some other stuff). It would still render the skybox, but if it's empty I'd imagine the hit would be minor.
