Hello all,

It appears that the FPS in my level is really starting to deteriorate. I set most of the concealed surfaces to "none." My texture sizes are mostly 512x512, with a few exceptions of 1024x512 and 256x256. It's a BSP level with all its lights set to "hi-res."

The lag isn't TOO bad, given that my video card isn't decent (64mb Intel onboard), but if there is a way to increase the FPS, please tell! I've read comments about loading visible fragments of the level at a time, but am totally oblivious as to how this is done.

Any help is greatly cherished, thanks!

Hi Liger, you could use the LOD (Level of Detail) System. Also you could decrease the visible range for your game. Just look in the manual.

Well, the fact that its a BSP level is one problem. BSP runs substantially slower than modeled levels.

LOD is the easiest way to increase FPS, but only in wide spaces. If your in a small room, LOD will likely do nothing for your FPS.

Really, if you have small, indoor levels, and you want to increase FPS, you will have to either decrease some texture sizes, or get REALLY creative with your level design.

If you could design your levels so that the player only sees the bare minimum of a level at any given time, you could increase FPS. However, this is a very difficult task to achieve, especially while keeping the game interesting at the same time.

Anyways, good luck,
Raddaddy

Levels made from blocks render very slowly. It's hard enough getting a block-only level to render even a half million polygons per second on a good card. A model-only level renders at least 80 times faster, allows for freedom of shapes and sizes, and otherwise much more flexibility. The only two weaknesses are lighting (which can be a little tricky to get right since static lights don't affect models, dynamic lights do) and collision (which is a bit tricky to get working right, but once figured out, it's no big deal). From my benchmark tester program (on the downloads page), Gamestudio in a model-only level, is capable of rendering over 350,000 polygons on today's midrange video cards at 60 fps. A block-only level couldn't manage 1 fps with this many polygons in view. This scene, on my current setup, renders well past 200 fps and it doesn't use collision, LOD, it's not optimized, and there's something like 60,000 visible polygons. It's a model-only level I haven't done much with since September 2005.

Thank you for your tips, guys. I will start reading about the LOD system right now, and with respect to model-levels, I think it's too late to go back...unless there's a way to completely convert my block-level into the latter. And even then, as ulililia pointed out, model-levels are less diverse as respects to lighting.

P.S. Very nice model-level by ulililia, but again, the lighting is honestly very limited.

It was last updated in September 2005 and back then (and still now), I've had trouble with lighting as the colors get washed out from the Sun. I do agree that lighting is more limited since only dynamic lights affect entities and that hardware only supports 8 such lights.

My LOD system allows for far more flexibility than the engine's built-in system does. Not only 4 LOD entities, but any number with the changes being set at distances unique to each entity (and they can be factorized as well making higher LODs visible longer at one angle than other angles). It does require a little more effort and in some cases can even be as fast or even faster than the engine's built-in LOD system.