lightmapscale

(fidel castro) #1

hi,

im already in a discussion with soem friend.

topic: lightmapscale & value of 0.1

does it influence only the lenght of the compile process or does it influence also the level performance ?

gerbils opinion:

I’m afraid they are wrong.
Firstly, having 80+ lightmaps eats up LOTS of VRAM - anyone with smaller amounts of VRAM will chug into tons of problems as the lightmaps get swapped in and out of VRAM each and every frame, this will most likely give people <10 fps on old cards. Even on new cards, with every lightmap in memory, it increases both the CPU and rendering overhead because polygons are processed in batches according to their texture + lightmaps. With (many) more lightmaps, you’ll end up with lots more permutations of textures + lightmaps, involving vastly more state swapping while rendering, and using much more graphics card bandwidth.

Let me put it like this - on my relatively powerful card (ti4200 x8 agp with 256 megs of VRAM) I went from <40 fps to >80 fps. You can’t really argue with that You may not be seeing the performance difference yourself because some other part of the map (maybe CPU usage processing the geometry) is the bottleneck, but it certainly will affect plenty of people, some to the point of not really being able to run your map

yndar: now its on yours :moo:

ciao
fidel

(ydnar) #2

More lightmaps = more shaders = more rendering time = lower performance and higher memory usage.

Be frugal with _lightmapscale 0.125. Use it only where it really would matter.

y

(Matt) #3

You should make your entire map _lightmapscale .1

Compile with -super 8 -thresh .1 -patchshadows -filter -bounce 20

Give me a call in 2042 when it’s done. By the time it compiles, our computers will be able to handle it in-game. :slight_smile:

Actually do what ydnar says, be really frugal, and remember a lot of times you can get a sharp shadow with _lightmapscale .25.

The majority of players are complete idiots and wouldn’t care or notice. A lot of people play with vertexlight in Quake 3 still. :frowning:

(G0-Gerbil) #4

Heh, fortunately Fidel is only mapping for ET where you can’t use vertex lighting (unless you are running dev mode, in which case it looks crap as hell - IE how most RTCW custom maps looked cos no-one bothered to make vertex mode look ok).

I failed to point out to Fidel anyway that many of his surfaces won’t get that high a lightmap resolution because the lightmap needed for large polygons would be too big for an individual default lightmap image.

If I recall, in these circumstances doesn’t q3map2 simply use the biggest lightmap possible to fit within the space?

Forgot to tell Fidel, this is why some of his polygons have ultra high detail lightmaps, and the big ones don’t.

(fidel castro) #5

thx guys.