Rabbit:
Thanks for the mirror. I occaissionally play HQ on the public 4mori server.

Ace:
Non-4 sided skyboxes.
When I was playing MP on UO I noticed that the skyboxes dropped down to intersect with the tops of some buildings. I figured this helps create better cells by filling in unwanted space which would not be passed through by players and thus helped to reduce load on the engine in both drawing and lighting.

When I made Beyond Rostov Campaign for UO I tried to seperate each battle area into their own box, linking them through buildings or tunnels - so really the maps (especially urban ones) were a series of rectangles joined up. This really reduced the strain on the lighting compile as it could compile the lighting for each area individually without having to reference the others, and helped keep the number of models/brushes drawn by the engine in game lower - because it didn't have to keep checking if it could see things outside of the individual areas.

If you use protals to segregate these areas this doesn't work so well on a large open plan, rural map like eastyorks2 as the engine isn't always certain what it should draw and you get pop-up of distant objects. But if you don't portal the wide open spaces you can still fill areas with skybrush to help reduce the space which the compiler and processor have to draw.

Cod2 is a more powerful engine than UO, and I was able to make a much bigger map with eastyorks2 than any of the B.Rostov ones, but every little bit of power you can try to save helps. I still had to throw in a totally seperate section (the path to- and including -the finale at the church) which is joined by the second bunker/tunnel system, otherwise compiling all of that space together was out of the question.

So, to sum up, my idea is that if you can seperate areas of your map physically, and fill others by extending the skybox into areas the player can't go - like in the middle of a big wall of bushes - then you can save stress on both the compiler which will give you bigger maps, and on the draw engine in game, which will give better frame rates.

anytime m8

Hope to catch you on the public for some killing then

Thanks for the info York.