r_speed Paranoia Created 18 years ago2005-10-03 17:20:34 UTC by Boxtop17

All this talk about r_speeds and how they can wreck a map's playability without even breaking a sweat, I became a little paranoid and decided to check my testmap for problems (because, after all, it is my testmap) and I thought I'd be a cautious mapper instead of a n00b who thinks he's l33t. But considering how much of a worrywort I tend to be, it was a bad idea. So here's what I'm asking. (The screenshots I show are dark because the lighting sucks and I converted BMPs to PNGs using Photoshop.) And I did read the r_speeds tut, so don't point me to that.

1. R_speeds: I know that n00b boxmaps (or "crapmaps", as I like to call them) are notorious for having high r_speeds because of their emence size and a lack of entities to fill the void (not the Void), but since this is my 1 1/2th map I thought I'd get used to checking for r_speeds. It seems that the highest rating I got was 211 wpolys, and that's standing in the rightmost corner (at the beginning of the level), and having a FOV of everything, as in this shot: http://img159.imageshack.us/img159/6205/rspeeds0012qz.png (Sometimes I get a max of 202 by stading up next to the teleporter.) In the second room there's a max of about 160something. I want to ask: Is this normal? For a boxmap, anyway? And if not, is there a way to change that instead of deleting all the stuff in my map? I'm quite fond of my teleporter in the second room (shot here: http://img226.imageshack.us/img226/7343/mappy0013bp.png ) and the radios (my first good prefab, although the antenna splits up the speaker its on in gl_wireframe mode).

2. epolys: Next, the epolys are a little high, but that's usually normal when you have entites (ie monsters) in the picture (max is 1040 epolys, 1160something when the player breaks the grating over the button on to open the portal cage in the first part.) But the thing is when I turn away to face a wall, I still get a reading of 329 epolys. Isn't it supposed to be zero, or do the epolys also go up when the player is holding a weapon?

And last but not least, gl_wireframe. When I first used gl_wireframe, I was shocked to find out how much the floor and ceiling were split up and I realized why I got a reading of 883 faces during compile. After some tinkering, I managed to shave 21 faces off that amount, but it still was high, so I had to delete this little number (my experiment with func_trains): http://img160.imageshack.us/img160/7776/decor1wc.png and then came up with 765 faces. Unfortunatly, the ground still looks fractured: http://img48.imageshack.us/img48/5247/wireframe7xl.png . I know this looks wrong because the floor is a flat surface with no VMing or anything. I forgot to mention I tried moving things 1-unit away from their surface (ie the metal prongs in the teleporter room), but it looks like those objects are just hovering above their surfaces.

Also, do you guys know where I can go with this map? I'd like to make something of it other than a crapmap. I was thinking a DM map, and make the teleporter room a trap and have walls and stuff players can hide behind. And does anyone have ideas for better lighting, because I was afraid of long VIS times being the mark of an abnormal map as well.

Anyway, I felt I had too many questions to post my map in the Map Vault, so after a struggle I finnaly found a place to host my file after TheFileHut became borked. Here's the map (with titles.txt and sentances.text). You may hear the PA announcer say "blue is a <garbled>" because I tried to make him say "color" but I'm not good with the commands yet. Also, there's two radios in my map that are supposed to play tunes. So to prevent any conflicts with 56kers, I put them in a seperate rar archive:

The map: http://www.freewebs.com/boxtopstuff/mappy.zip
The song clips Fragmeister is going to attempt to host. If he can't do it, then I'll see what I can do with the zipped version. He'll post the link in here. The first song is some smooth jazz tune, and the second one is called "Make Poop" by Mr. Safety of SMPFilms. However, these songs are optional (I think). Just for ambience.

Anyway, thanks for your help!

R_Speeds. Keep them below 600 or 700. I always try to keep it lower than 499, though it is not always possible.

Epolys are also the polygons of the player's weapon.

A polygon is not a brush. It is about half of a texture unit. Imagine a texture that is a tile. For every 64x64 tile there are 2 polygons. So the floor is split even if there are no other brushes touching it.

a poligon is a triangle ( 3 lines of a brush ) i think, use hint brushes etc. alot to keep the rspeeds low it realy realy works hehe

wpoly count can easily go up to 900 or 1200, depending on the systems you're target audience have. 900 is fine these days.

The face splitting you see in wireframe mode is caused by brushes that intersect or touch other brushes, but large faces get split anyway (every 240 units if the texture is scaled at 1).
There are some techniques to counter this, by using entities (when an entity touches a world face, that face doesn't get broken up) or leaving a little space between the brushes (often looks odd). Don't waste time trying to avoid all splitting, just do it for small or oddly shaped objects. Especially circular objects cause a lot of extra face splitting so these are best made into entities.
About the 240 units splitting: you can use a different texture scale to change the splitting amount, but if it's a floor the player walks over, then a large scale often looks bad so that's not a good idea actually. I'd say don't worry too much about this type of face splitting. It's normal.
@Kasperg: you probably refer to HL2's wireframe mode? That one shows triangles, HL doesn't.

epoly's are model polygons. These render roughly 10 times faster than world polygons.

Anyway, the map you've got now probably doesn't need optimization because your poly counts are pretty low and performance is good, isn't it?
Though planning the layout beforehand so area's are blocked from each other (e.g. there's no direct line of sight from one area to another) is an important step. Check 'gl_wireframe 2' to see what's rendered (it's more than you can see as a player).

Oh, and a polygon is a multi-sided shape. Not necessarily a triangle.