How are we currently focusing on outdoor area usage ?

zicada · Post by **zicada** » Thu Mar 29, 2007 1:07 pm

Hi guys,

Since the game came out, there has been alot of discussion about the size and ammount of outdoor areas to use in NWN2 modules. Becase the areas seemed to take alot of space, and it seemed at one point that we could only use about 1/10th of the outdoor areas we used in NWN1 modules, there was alot of talk about how to build to accomodate this.

Recently, data suggests that we most likely aren't that worse off in NWN2 that we first expected. First of all, modules can be up to 9GB in size after bake and still be hosted through a series of trickery.

Modules can also be cut into pieces and hosted alongside one another. Since we are using NWNX4, its quite possible to cut a module in half once it has reached critical mass rather painlessly and effortlessly.

I would like your input on this, and what the current mode of thinking is within the building teams.

It would be a shame not to go for the approach of vast outdoor areas since it now seems we can.

There are nwn2 modules around now with over 100 24x24 and 32x32 areas that are beeing hosted on 3gb+ machines apparently. One can only assume these numbers will go up even higher with more and more great patchwork beeing released by OE.

Finally. Are you guys cutting out all the un-needed fat from your modules before running them ? In one thread on the forums, they cut a 1,7gb module down to 200mb in size before hosting it. The restuling module used around 500mb of memory. It appears alot of the data in the mods is unneeded to host.

darrenhfx · Post by **darrenhfx** » Thu Mar 29, 2007 6:38 pm

The current plan for Cold Lands retains the worst case scenario bias from 4 months ago. I would love to have a decent way to represent the vast wilds as personally one of my favorite parts of the game is exploration.
To that effect, if we could come up with a few sugestions on how to take advantage of the new information on optimizing, the team would be very much in favour of making use of them.

zicada · Post by **zicada** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 12:52 am

Bump,

Think its important that we look into this.

I know alot of the nwn2 development teams use offsite forums, but it would be very nice if you came by to post here every now and then

ç i p h é r · Post by **ç i p h é r** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 1:58 am

After some deliberation, we've settled on 24x24 areas. After having built a 16x16 area, I've come to the conclusion that it simply feels too confined (the border region is so large that I think it tends to overshadow the relatively small playable region). Conversely, a 32x32 area is most optimal in terms of space usage (limits amount of duplicate border regions) but can be a real pain to actually build - 16x16 already takes a great deal of time. We settled on 24x24 to try and strike a balance between the two. Preliminary calculations put us at about 47 exterior areas. It will no doubt take us a long time to build that many exteriors.

HEEGZ · Post by **HEEGZ** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 3:14 am

I tested several different sizes last fall and found myself gravitating towards 24x24. On the OAS we are using 32x32 maps for some of the wilderness areas but it is only a small server where size is irrelevant. It's possible these bigger maps might be laggy or low framerate on low-end machines so might have to fix them later.

zicada · Post by **zicada** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 3:28 am

ç i p h é r wrote:After some deliberation, we've settled on 24x24 areas. After having built a 16x16 area, I've come to the conclusion that it simply feels too confined (the border region is so large that I think it tends to overshadow the relatively small playable region). Conversely, a 32x32 area is most optimal in terms of space usage (limits amount of duplicate border regions) but can be a real pain to actually build - 16x16 already takes a great deal of time. We settled on 24x24 to try and strike a balance between the two. Preliminary calculations put us at about 47 exterior areas. It will no doubt take us a long time to build that many exteriors.

How is that calculated ? The 47 exteriors at 24x24 ?

Blackwill · Post by **Blackwill** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 5:37 am

Yeah, 24x24. But I hear we will be able to do way more areas than that and run the mod.

ç i p h é r · Post by **ç i p h é r** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 6:10 am

zicada wrote:How is that calculated ? The 47 exteriors at 24x24 ?

I didn't mean to imply that was some kind of limit for module size, just that from some preliminary drawings, we estimate about 47 exteriors to capture Waterdeep. How did we get that number? It's HEEGZ math. MS Paint + Rough Grid + Abacus.