ONS-Rail

[Maniac]

Good news Mr.Cat!

I removed following things:
- all T-like pipe holders;
- both water towers;
- both wire-like watchtowers holders;
- all wireframe-like boxing around pipes;
Then i rebuilt geometry and lighting.
After that the FPS became stable on all map including center, with no spikes at all.

P.S.: i blame watchtowers and/or water tower, while testing I experiences lag FPS when they were in viewport, moving camera so they are just out of screen removed the lag.

[Cat1981England]

That's fantastic, thank you Mr.Mani. The only other issue if this does work is the stalemates, so if anyone has any feedback about the link setup, centre node and/or ideas about how we can improve the gameplay that would be great

I'll try and get another edit done by Sunday night with these changes in mind.

[Maniac]

Well, tested a bit more: with avg FPS of 40-60 outside and 70-90 inside (max ~100 when staring at wall from point blank), spike with all decorations is 20-25 FPS, with decorations removed it is 25-35 FPS (~5 FPS gained). Need more testing though, never experienced really low FPS here (like 10-15) and can not say if it is fixed.

About node setup: i came up with an asymmetrical one:


Should remove one-side push with only first node taken on other side, splitting team in 2 halves for same result on both sides of map and remove such a slaughter from center. Couldn't test it on humans, though.

Aside from that, would be nice to make tunnels 3-4 times wider and add some health/small shields pickups and mb boxes or whatnot there, so some small team action could be done there.

[GLoups!]

You may push the respawn time of JumpBoots from 30 sec to 45 or 1mn (Array pickup in the Jumpboots properties) for avoid spamming behaviors because thoses are very easy to reach and ended up making a kangaroo festival

[Cat1981England]

Well I tried removing the water tower and lookouts Mani, but sadly i only got a 1-3 fps boost. I did like the idea though and spent yesterday gradually removing things from the map, rebuilding and then testing to see if I could find the culprit. Got all the way down to the simple bsp structures without finding a single thing which is causing major problems. It seems that the issue with this map is simply it's size, shape and complexity.

What I've done is tried to simplify things and optimise as much as possible without ruining the original feel of the map and it's appearance. It isn't finished yet and I probably won't have it done until next weekend, but as it stands I'm getting a 40% fps boost over the C2 edit and around 100% over Beta15 without any bots.

If you want to take a look here's a link. If anyone wants to play with bots they'll need to make their own link setup.

[Maniac]

Thanks mr.Cat!

First of all, I myself do not have that "terrible terrible lag", just some drop (i have same drop in AggressiveAlleys) which can be considered minor. Those above were just thoughts about what can cause old visuaproocessor architecture to die in pain.

And, about map itself - what about placing some kind of big smoking fire in center and place portal wall in it to split in halves?

Also, what about link setup? Did it work?

[Cat1981England]

It was a good idea, thanks for suggesting it

I'm trying to be really careful with the appearance of the map as I know Crusha and the original creator have put a huge amount of time into it. The building at the centre of the map I think is a bit more in keeping and divides the map up well.

No I haven't tried the link setup yet but it looks good, everything done so far has had that in mind. I won't try it until all the optimising is done.

[Maniac]

A little note about lag in center: tested for it a bit more. Still no big lag, and that small one is caused (in my case) by graphical effects (attackable node light pillar), not water towers, so - sorry for misleading.

[Cat1981England]

Sorry for the delay, took longer then I thought it would.

Rail-Beta-C3

Hundreds of very small replacements, removals and adjustments which aren't worth mentioning. The big changes are the removal of the highest central pipes, a wider central building and a more extensive sewage system.

Tried it on the test server and got an average fps of 90.9 and a low of 90.2 with no "feeling" of lag or P/L.

The sewage system has a large room under the central building, two large pipes which are connected to this room and run all the way to the kamikaze pickups just outside each team base and four smaller pipes which run from nodes 3, 4, 5 and 6 which are intentionally narrow and dark for both ambushing and getting behind tunnel campers (yes you know who you are ). There's a haste relic pickup in the sewage room to encourage players to go down there (it's a lot of fun to team the haste relic with jumpboots btw ). The greater pipe network should help performance by getting some players away from the centre of the map and increase Z-axis.

Using Mani's suggested link setup which works very well with bots but needs a run with people to see if it works.

I'll give it a couple of days to give people who wish to do so a chance to take a look and offer feedback. Will put in on this weekend for a trial run.

[Steinein]

Love what you've done with it Cat. There are so many different routes you can walk and things you can jump on, it's great. Sewer system looks good to me. Kamikaze thing is great fun and should be just fine power-wise. Jump boots are also a lot of fun on this map. I think this map will do great on the server.

I'm a little bit worried about the speed relic, it might be a bit too over powered, since the map is pretty small and with the boots you can go all over the place. It drops when you die and since the map is pretty open, I'm pretty sure another person will pick it up most of the times. And since the respawn time of the relic didn't seem too long (didn't count), there might be serveral of those things going round in the map at some point.
Other than that, only thing that might be nice to change is the walls of the base barrack. It's a bit too open I think. Especially the front one on the side of 2 and 8 (see image). You can shoot the core from a long distance outside the barrack when you're on that side. Can't really defend the node because of that. Think it might be better to close that one, or make it smaller so you can't shoot like the image.

Rail.jpg (541.38 KiB) Viewed 10620 times

That's all I could think of, I love it, great edit! Can't wait to play it on the server.

Stein

Ps. who's wanted dead or alive and is born in 1973