digitalcenturion

Good news, tested the simplified road network by playing DUWS RHS:Escalation edition and it worked great. Some screenshots. It seems I can start populating this map in earnest soon, and ofcourse giving the satmap some more TLC...

Turns out it was related to my roads as performance was just fine if I leaft a blank path to roads or used altis roads. 2 million nature objects over 30x30km = no problems.

Hi again guys, I am now having a performance trouble on my map again. I recently redid the road network (it should be all around better and less error prone now) and also smoothed the height field in L3DT/Photoshop and rebuilt my terrain. No config changes were made, but now I am getting bad performance, like there is something going on all the time behind the scenes, some heavy calculations. Which is odd because my map is the exact same size as Altis, hasn't very much objects really (1,2 million, must be less than altis, mostly trees and rocks). If some experienced map maker would like to take a look on it I would really appreciate it, I have it on google drive. I am close to releasing it publicly (well, version 0.1 but still) and I would like to fix this problem before that. Thanks!

Ok Now I have selected a road network consisting of 1435 road path networks, spanning 1328km. It is quite a reduction from the previous but if the gameplay is smoother as a result I think it is worth it. A lot of the paths in my original network are more or less useless small stumps etc. This means that I am one step further from a 1:1 world, so I am glad I decided to only loosely base my terrain on the RL location.

Oh no worries about that, I don't know when to stop :P I am currently making the best of a 6hrs ferry ride to select what roads to keep and what to ditch... I think I can squeeze most roads of imporantce in the 1400 road part budget :) Currently at just over 1000 but I have the entire city and all the main roads, so the dirt paths will fit nicely in the remainder. A lot of shorter stumps will be absent of course but it may be just as well regarding the AI. Then I hope to be once and for all done with the road network :)

Ok I made a feedback tracker HERE, so please vote everybody who considers this important.

I haven't gotten around to making the ticket yet :) But, maybe the game keeps the entire road network in memory at the same time and when enough units do pathfinding it comes crashing down. Or perhaps (hopefully) it's just a bug the devs haven't noticed yet because altis ís nowhere near that limit.

Thanks, sorry for the late reply. That would be absolutely great! Yeah the models are not complicated in themselves. And they could even be made into one or two types of general bridge. Anyways, thanks a lot!

Regarding the A2 objects they are the same regardless wether it is A3MP, AIA TP or eventually CUP that will provide them for A3. Ie they just point to certain 3d objects with a certain path. The vibe is going to be balkan, but it is obviously based on Finnish terrain. The generic feel is going to be distinctly eastern, yet not necessary one certain place or city. A good example of this is the world of Half Life 2: references from here and there but hard to pinpoint exactly what it is supposed to be, yet it feels real.

Nikiforos I think some of the default buildings will be just fine, and some from Arma 2. As I said, I am really not going for a purely scandinavian vibe on this. While unique custom buildings would be awesome it is not realistic at this time. One has got to be realistic.

Mikey no sweat. BTW There is no technical part to putting buildings on a map using for example map builder (a mission you run and then you just add buildings on the map). Have a good one testing your work :) Mech thanks, I see promise too. For certain scenarios size is king, and while i love Altis we can do bigger :)

Perez I PM'd you, thanks! Mikey sorry maybe I was not specific enough, there are actually very few buildnings placed yet on the map, hence this being a "preview" version. Again, sorry for not being clear enough on that. But if enough people lend a hand, the emptiness can soon change :)

Thanks for the comments guys and for the hosting! As said, I need people to help me populate this map, human settlements will only look right when placed by hand. And as said, no technical knowledge needed, just if you have a free or afternoon and could place some buildings that's enough! Regarding the roads.. I have an idea, if the Altis amount is the hard limit, to progressively bring the amount down. The main roads are very long so those are only maybe less than 100, then the more important dirt paths and city roads should all fit into the budget of 1400... Small few meter stumps diverting from the main road can safely be deleted without affecting gameplay. All this is applicable only if it is indeed the road number that is the main issue, and not things like overall size, vertex count or something else..

Thanks! Bridges are highway bridges, the bridge leading to Emäsalo/Emsalö and the downtown bridges

Thaks BLB... Well the thing is I got the pathfinding to work sort of well enough with some road debugging help from Rydygier. As for intricate, in more developed countries there are a lot of roads, esp. if you want to feature a decent size city. As for the road network I would say it is none or all in this case... Just a few wont do much good and just look retarded. I did an autocombine in global mapper that brought the number down to about 6000 but it still bugs out in game. So I would pin this on an engine issue... I guess I would need to make a report of this and cross my fingers. EDIT: And also, why should a large road network be a problem? We have millions of objects that the game copes with gladly.. Personally I hope it's just a bug because the devs havent tried such large road networks yet.

Well that's nice. It sort of renders my entire projects irrelevant, and thus the large amount of hrs I have put into it recently. I really wish some dev could give some hard info on this. What is the point of a new road system if it has such inherent limitations? And to make a project WE the modders would very much like to know the hard limits before embarking on a project and potentially putting several 100s of hours into them. I guess I will have to try and export just my main roads and see what happens then-

What I did was combine all the roads that needed combining, wiped all the features then readded ID and ORDER (set all to 3 in GM because way faster then in TB), reimported to TB changed the asphalt roads etc and then exported to roads.shp. Why this crap is happening I dont know. Either TB cant properly handle the shapefiles without corrupting something or the engine cant handle this many roads. Either way it renders my entire project more or less impossible. EDIT: Also, what needs mentioning is just how spectacular the game breaking issues are when the roads go bad. Basically it starts destroying the games config internally (cant read it or something else) so basic BIS units and vehicles start giving RPT spams and visual glitching.

hmm I really don't know; I'm not very good on the terminology here. I guess one line is made up of points or vertexes, but what is a segment in relation to this?. TB and Global Mapper reliably selects the whole road when I click on it. GM reports 9 594 features when I select all? Where are the 20 more that Navicat sees. I do believe this road number might be correct for while som roads are very long the majority are just small dirt paths that go into the woods from the highway.

I did some testing: My map without roads: FINE My map with Altis Roads.shp (which is totally inappropriate, but a useful test): FINA my roads: total crapout. In Global mapper Altis roads measure total about 730km while my roads are 2454km -> obvious difference but not I think critical? My individual paths are way longer than Altis tho, could that be a source of problems? They are long because I have combined them from shorter segments because I was getting crashes, which might relate to some hard but unknow max limit of road segments?

Ok well this is proving to be more difficult than I thought. While I don't get outright crashes on loading my map any more my roads are definatively the source of bad performance and glitch up the entire map and game after a while Can someone take a look at my road shapefile and tell me what is wrong? Please!! https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B15h3Pblg44Cam1qTUk5eHdmcVE/view?usp=sharing

IS there someway to "debug" the map and check what is running and how much oomph the different operations need. BTW I just tried a denser vegetation from world tools and I got 2 million nature objects.. is this too much? Is there inehrently less performance in many object maps compared to few or is it density ie how much to render at a time that determines performance?

Yes it works! Thanks a bunch!!

Indeed, stop teasing us :) Seriously though the tool looks to be pretty darn complete and solid as hell. This will be immense for any terrain!

Just when I thought my road related woes were over I started to get CTDs again. SO I had to export my roads and remove all the attributes again. Note: the attributes get f*cked up really easy in TB for some reason. So my advice is to start assigning road types and orders only when everything else is inplace, in case you need to wipe the attributes at some point. Well, beside road type assignment my roads are DONE! I measured in global mapper, 2454 km was the result :) Glad I didn't have to place those by hand

KNG I'm sorry I do not know what problem you are having. Seems editor.sqs related though? Regarding the roads I can now almost certainly confirm that I have fixed my problems by going through my roads in Global mapper and combining and simplifying them. I don't have extreme FPS problems anymore which is also nice.