Optimisation? Like Hell!
You guessed it, map 1 is now almost complete. It’s currently undergoing, or at least I’m trying, optimisation efforts. The last props were placed and the last triggers were set up, I sighed a breath of utter relief that this trialing ordeal was finally over and compiled everything to see how it looked ingame. Cue much cursing and a trickle of a tear as I dropped into a world that, for lack of a better phrase, ran like a bitch. It looked pretty but it was undoubtedly broken as looking anywhere in the vicinity of the eastern area of the map caused massive framerate drops from a clean 90fps down to, oh about, 20. Even now I’m still somewhat puzzled as to what is actually causing the slowdown, it seems too localised in one section of the map to actually be a general overload of system resources; so after much searching both in Hammer and in game I resolved that my best bet was probably to begin optimisation with area portals and hints.
Of course, being new to the whole Hammer shenanigans, it turns out that if you don’t start your map with a good idea of how you’re going to optimise it already formed then things can get quite tricky when you actually start throwing down the func_areaportals. In this instance I decided that the map needed to be split down the centre with an open area portal since the general design means that without one you can pretty much see the entire second half of the map further down the road from the start zone, coincidentally the same place where you’ll feel the huge framerate hit. Easier said than done. I may have known from the start how I was going to lay the level out but I certainly wasn’t clear on the area portal requirements until recently when I looked them up. As such a considerably amount of fiddling with base blocks and boxing in of underground displacements which were opened up to the free sky has been going on and even now the portals are being antsy as to whether they want to work or not. The one success I had was quickly followed by failure as I thought “Well I’ll tweak them a bit so that they don’t merge”, followed by inability to return the map to it’s previous state which was followed by an instant engine error when I compiled.
It really isn’t nice, I’ve certainly learnt my lesson and will be taking better care with future maps. As soon as these irritating errors are fixed I’ll be setting up the nav zones for the level and then closed beta testing will be taking place with a few previews and, camera skills withstanding, a trailer being released. When everything’s hunky dory with those work on the second map, which has already been planned out in its entirity and is currently undergoing closer scrutiny so that I don’t fall into the same despairing pits as this one, will begin whilst McDonald’s Plight is released.
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