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

[Wreck]

Brand new interiors making use of the doorways on the wall faces? That'll be very interesting to see. I had always thought it'd be cool to have more interiors in the Streets, especially down by Valentin. It looks like this is finally going to happen.
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[bmw]

The number of interiors I add will ultimately depend on framerate. Streets is already painfully slow, but there's a ton of polygons to be deleted, I've been working on getting rid of pasted on windows, unnecessary frame detail, and the 3rd stories of some of the buildings - I'll post some more screenshots when I get more of this part done.

Problem is most of the door frames face large open areas, so I'll wait and see just how much framerates improve from my other modifications before I add any rooms to those areas.

[bmw]

Finally an update:

First off, this ended up being a far more tedious project than I had ever anticipated - But my work is paying off - I'm deleting anywhere from 1/3 to 2/3 of the vertices from each and every room in this map. When all is said and done, Streets will probably see close to a 50 percent reduction in vertices. I'm about 3/4 done and finally for the first time gave it a test in 4-player multi. It plays incredibly well, even better than my bottling room map, and I'm not even done yet. When all is said and done, this map will perform SOLID even in 4 player mode, which is quite an accomplishment considering it used to be quite sluggish even in 2p mode.

Here's a few screenshots:

[Wreck]

You've really stripped out quite a lot, haven't you? That must have taken some time to weed through. It's strange how much different it makes the map look without the added details on the buildings, but I could definitely see it making a big improvement in performance. Even in all of my attempts at a Streets multi map, the framerate stumbled with just two players. But if it is running decently with the full four, than that's a great achievement.
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[Wreck]

I figured I might as well just post these shots in here, as it suits the topic discussion and doesn't need its own thread. Trying to optimize The Quad, I removed the pipes from the ceiling. It wasn't too difficult to do, as every pipe shared one texture. But it wasn't until after getting rid of them that I realized that the underside of each balcony also uses that image. So, I had to go back over it and make sure I didn't accidentally axe them out again from three rooms. Once that was taken care of, I noticed that a section where a pipe was didn't have a railing. The pipe ran through where it was supposed to be, so Rare just cut it out. I added the railing in by copying out data from other balconies, and corrected the length of the shorter one. This also meant that I needed to make a small clipping alteration, which I did manually in HexEdit, as my attempts in the GoldenEditor caused players to go out of bounds. Anyways, here is how it looked before, as well as how it looks now...




This also helps to illustrate just how much the pipes really did interfere with firefights, especially when using rockets and grenades...




I don't know how much more I'll be doing with the map, but I may need to try some more clipping tweaks to help with the "grenades falling through platforms" issue.
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[Wreck]

Just a small update on The Quad. I tried using the same method BMW came up with on the balconies to help avoid all thrown and launched grenades from falling through the floor and landing on the surface beneath, by pulling the ground level clipping back from all surrounding walls by one unit. However, this didn't appear to make any difference. That's when I took notice of the angled walls. The upper walls around the map all slant inwards. This means that, unless you hit the lowest portion of the wall, the clipping change wouldn't even matter. And the lowest section is at the same height as the balcony floor, which makes the modification absolutely useless. Bringing the clipping inward would prevent players from hugging the wall, keeping them from entering certain spaces, even. So, I decided to straighten out all of the walls. It's really hard to tell a difference between the original and altered versions. The dark shadowing along the ceiling makes it look like more is going on. After straightening the walls, the grenade issue is mostly taken care of. If the projectile bounces off of a wall, it should stay on the balcony without any problems. It's only in the case that the grenade lands without first hitting a wall, that it'll fall through. This issue will still pop up, but far fewer times than before. Thanks to BMW for the info on grenades and clipping.
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[bmw]

Nice work. I've never really taken a look at the quad room in the editor, but how many tris (roughly) were you able to get rid of by deleting those pipes, and did it make a measurable framerate difference?

And as for the clipping/grenade fix, I think that's about the best we can do for now - its certainly an improvement from what we had before.

btw - did you ever consider turning the steps into ramps? You can get rid of quite a few vertices that way.

I would also recommend modifying your secondary vertice files to get rid of everything except for the railing.

[Wreck]

When I removed the pipes, I didn't even bother to note down how many tris I might be cutting out. I think it was Room 4 (the balcony corner marked 3) that had the most. The pipes did cross over into all four rooms, but they were more present in two. As for framerate, I haven't really had a chance to sit down and compare the old to the new.

I had thought about turning the stairs into ramps, but I'm not totally sure. The stairs just look right, you know? I suppose I could give it a test and see how it feels.

I don't think there's much extra in the secondary indices to worry about. There's a couple of numbers (2, 3 & 4), an arrow (three tris), the word "banko", and a bit of caution striping. Between all of that, there's probably not enough to make even the slightest dent in the overall performance. Plus, the added details help to spice things up a little.
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[HackBond]

Cradle, serious framerate drop during multi and single. Maybe someone can tune it down?
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[Wreck]

I don't think there's really too much you can do to improve the Cradle's performance. There's just so much being loaded in and drawn at the same time. You could strip out certain things, but the problem is that nearly the entire map can be seen at any given time. Only the fog prevents you from seeing areas past a certain distance, and I don't know if that closes any portals or not. Even if it did, that won't do a lot to help multiplayer. It's kind of one of those square-pig in a round-hole situations. Unless you cut off the corners and turn it into something less recognizable, it just isn't going to work.

Remove the three support struts, edit out all of the other structural supports, kill the bottom platform, and maybe (just maybe) a multiplayer version might be more tolerable. It'd also probably make for more activity. Running around looking for an opponent takes up more time than anything. I blame those long ramps to the support struts.
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[Wreck]

Out of curiosity, I started modifying the Cradle background. There's still more work to be done, but progress is coming along nicely. It's starting to feel a lot more like a death match arena. Once I have something worthwhile to show, I'll post a few pictures.
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[bmw]

I'm long overdue to post another screenshot update, so here goes...



I'm like 95 percent done with the bg data. Now I'm working out the clipping which has to be done from scratch and is proving to be somewhat cumbersome because much of the "floor" extends beyond walls so I cannot simply convert bg triangles to clipping.

[EternallyAries]

Wow BMW thats looks so cool. So um what are you going to put in those new rooms? That you made.
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[bmw]

Those garage rooms you see are actually imported from depot. Not sure what I'll put in them, probably 1 vehicle in each garage.

There's only one custom made hammer room in this map, I believe there's a screenshot of it earlier in this thread.

After testing I already see I have to raise the floor higher on the original gas station platform, when you stand on it you still can't see over the railing. That will be a hiding place with a great view of quite a bit of real estate.

[Wreck]

Certainly looks interesting. I'm glad to see that you've continued on with this project. The Streets is in dire need of a performance worthy multiplayer setup. Most of the others seem to feature blackouts or slowdowns. I've noticed it myself, while attempting to create my own multi map.
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