heres what the map looks like so far. upper pic is the hammer overview, and below it the ingame map from silent hill as host.

the final map will be roughly 25 000 units wide and long, huge, walking corner to corner takes many minutes, but thats what i want it to be like. best suited for a paranoid DM map for 64ppl servers...



and here some test screens







First pic shows the bridge close, second the same bridge, far away, third just some residential area.

So what bothers me is the low fps rate atm.. there are no visual restrictions, some blocks have solid buildings, the main roads are solid and all the rest is detail brushes. max fps was 150, min 50, and the map isnt nearly ready yet.

the black fog works fine, but i cant get a thick white snow fog to work... id love to lower the visibility to "shotgun range", currently the player can see too far.
But how ?

I found this brush type: func_lod

"Brush-built model that fades out over a specified distance. Useful for creating world detail that doesn't need to be drawn far away, for performance reasons."

Should i make all my detail buildings into _lod ?

As u can see in the 2 pics with the bridge, stuff is still visible over far distances, and well to be seen against a blue night sky.
This should go away when i add a 3D skybox later with some down scaled mountains and hills.

So, any tips or tech solutions on how to best work this big map out for good performance ?

how about this:

Also use plenty of portals on windows and doors so players can't see into buildings until they are at those buildings. You may also want to control your own portals.

yeah i know nothing about portals, going to tutorials now..

and i am not doing any indoor areas yet, way too much work to do already just with the map itself.

and what about the func_lod brushes (/details)?
do i make all my details into _lod, and set them to dissappear as far as the black fog goes ?

and how do i do a thick white smog, i played around with the dustcloud but cant get anything decent to work.