GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[Entropy Soldier]

Alright, triangle count currently stands at 8961, and i am down to the final room.

This, of course, is the center one.

I've been debating if i should split this up into four rooms, but i realized that, f you can see some of it, you will most likely be able to see all of it.

I do, however, have a strategy for the explosion clipping glitch. This is a common occurrence with ascended platforms that are clipped and above a floor in the same room that is also clipped. What happens is that if you hit a clipping tile on the above platform without being directly in line with it, the explosion teleports to the bottom.

What i will attempt to do is use the visibility editor to allow a small room to always see the center room. Then i will allot all clipping in the center room to the small room, which i hope will solve this issue.


Anyway, here's hoping that it runs well.


Also, another question. Do secondary indices exhaust the same amount of prosessor power that primary indices do? If so, would it be wise to omit the railings all together to improve performance?

[SubDrag]

Just make sure when you import it that the vertice file is less than 65K otherwise needs to be split into rooms. You'll prob. be close.

[Entropy Soldier]

well, this map will be split in to around 30 rooms, to get the absolute best performance possible.

My main concern, however, is the center room, as it is quite big and can be seen from a high number of places around the map, plus it would be fairly pointless to split it up into rooms, due to its open nature.

So, since i planned to add railings to the catwalk (which would add quite a bit of tri's and a fairly large surface area), would this decrease the performance on a 3-4 player multi match by a noticeable amount, or would the aesthetic effect outweigh its negative effect on the performance of the level?

[Camaro]

Wouldn't splitting up the big room be of some benefit. I mean, Runway is really open but still split into rooms.
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[Entropy Soldier]

Hmmmm...maybe, though, if i remember correctly, it worked for runway because there was a dense fog in the solo mission. Fog doesn't seem to work so well in multi, however, so its performance suffers.



Anyway, time to split this map into rooms.

Stats at time of posting:

7792 tri's

3953 points

11959 edges



I'll do the center room last, as I'm still debating on if i should make the railing or not. Any feedback on that would be greatly appreciated.

[Wreck]

Fact: railings look great, there's no doubt about that.
They also explain why people don't just fall off of suspended platforms as they strafe along the edges. If you keep it as simple as possible, by using only two triangles per edge, you should be fine. I can't see a significant impact on the performance, but that'd require testing.
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[Entropy Soldier]

yea, plus enigma-systems wouldn't want to draw attention to themselves with safety violations! :O Anyway, I'll see how the railings affect performance, but I'll probably add them.


Now, for another design choice. The stairs in the front room (the one with two stairways) add like 300 tri's to it. (600 total) Should i just make these ramps? They would be fairly steep (45 degree angle), but performance is the primary issue here.

[Wreck]

Ramps were the primary tool in reaching different heights in all of Rare's multiplayer-specific maps. On most occasions, you could get away with using only two triangles to build your entire ramp (four, if there is a visible underside). If the staircase features ten steps, that could require up to fourty tris - depending on the setup, of course. Even the way your walls are designed around the edge of each step may consume a lot of triangles alone. Take into consideration how many staircases there may be, and you could significantly reduce your Vertices and draws.

Only thing is, if they are really steep, it may feel a little awkward. Might not, though. I think the ramps in Dragonsbrethren's Soviet Office Tower map were pretty steep, but it never felt bad at all.
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[Entropy Soldier]

Well, i managed to make it 350 with the stairs (assuming it lets me delete lines) and 150 without.

Although its at a 45 degree angle, for multi, I'll probably make it a ramp, as those 200 polys are a very large reduction.


If i get around to making a solo mission for this (compounds is almost done, but i may scrap it because that level was practically impossible to make a mission for and it didn't turn out so well) I'll keep the stairs in to preserve the feel of the level (no office worker is going to walk up a 45 degree ramp every day, lol).

[DK25]

Entropy Soldier wrote:

(no office worker is going to walk up a 45 degree ramp every day, lol).

well, it could be handicap accesible, lol
although 45 degrees is not very wheelchair accesibke isnt it

[Entropy Soldier]

yep, 45 degrees is a square cut across the middle. I think that, in real life, to climb a ramp that steep, you would need to make the ramp out of a material that generates a high amount of friction. Or have all your office workers wear suction cups. XD


Anyway, after testing my theory about the explosion warping glitch, i found out that i was incorrect. I think it actually has to do with the triangles of a room, and when it collides with a horizontal tri's in the room, it "locks on", as bmw stated, to the lowest clipping triangle in the room. As i was wrong before, i could be totally wrong again, but its worth a shot.

In accordance with this theory, i divided the two large rooms with catwalks across the y axis, into a top and bottom segment.

This also has other benefits, since looking through the bottom entrances to each one only allows you to view the lower room, as opposed to a horizontal division, which would be much less effective, since most entrances to the room cannot be viewed at such an angle that it excludes most of it.

Anyway, i'm up to 18 rooms and have barley even covered a quarter of the map. This begs the question, is too many rooms bad for performance?
(ergo, are 4 rooms you will always have loaded the same, performance wise, as a single room that is basically all of them combined?)

[Entropy Soldier]

Well, just wanted to post an update to let everyone know that this map is still being worked on!


I've split everything up excluding the center room and the executive sector (the white area in the north east of the overhead image). As of now the map exceeds 70 rooms, so it will be quite large.

Anyway, i could have an alpha out by the end of the week if anyone is interested in looking through the map firsthand, because those pictures don't really show the layout too well.

[EternallyAries]

I love To Play it Entropy Soldier
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[Entropy Soldier]

well, i finished the initial optimization, and it would be ready for import...

except the mtl file decided it would like to be an enigma too.

64 entries for 20 textures, with about 15 of the more important ones missing the texture location data, so i don't know what texture it is or have any chance of finding out efficiently without going through 20 textures.

I'm going to try contacting TimEh about it, and hopefully he has a resolution to this issue. (we discussed mtl files before, but an entirely different section).


oh, the final room count stands at around 90, wow O_O

and final polys are at somewhere around 6500

[Entropy Soldier]

Well, i tried test importing the level with its construed texture organization, and encountered yet another error.




these are the only rooms that load

Not only that, but anything in any "non-viewable" rooms cannot be perceived in a 3rd person perspective, nor do bullets collide with the walls,, so these rooms simply are not loading at all.


I've tried altering the 21990 values, adding portals (which just concealed the rooms altogether), and other such things, all to no avail.

All my room vertice files are under 64kb (heck, most are under 5kb) so I'm reasonably certain that is not the issue.

It is worth noting that those rooms are the ones with the lowest room values. (1-8) They all imported fine into the editor, and i could view the entire level.

Well, considering the severity of this glitch, i would really appreciate any input on it. Thanks in advance.