I have a level with a simple rectangular floor. It loads and runs fine. However when I zoom out in the top view and enlarge the floor to make room to put lots more things, when I try to compile and it now gives a critical error "Surface too large to map."

Should I make the nexus larger? How much larger? What is a nexus anyway? Is that the problem? I should have gigs to spare in the computer memory. Demos with much larger areas to walk on run fine. Whats up with surface too large to texture and what can I do about it?
I would like to put a simple concrete texture on the whole floor. It can even be flat if it has to be.

???

Open WED and select your floor block. You can now see the block properties on the left-hand side. Click on the register Object and check the "Bound" values. I assume that your block simply is way too big. As a reference, my player is usually between 90 and 190 quants high, some people even prefer smaller scales.
Additionally, try to click "Default Settings" in the Map Builder dialog.
If you do not need shadows and/ or want so save some video space, you can set the Flat shading texture option, either in the texture window -> rightclick -> settings before you assign the texture, or select your block and set the surfaces manually to flat.

In Gamestudio (or any 3D engine, for that matter) units of measure like inches and meters have no meaning because there is no point of reference. For internal measurements, Gamestudio uses its own system in which the base unit is called a "quant", but this unit bears no relationship to real world measurements.

Following that thinking, you could thus technically define inches or meters in your virtual world as anything you like, but you must keep in mind that your computer has a hard limit. In otherwords, don't define your "virtual inch" as 3000 quants; as Superku said, you should pick a more reasonable number, like 4 quants. The reasoning behind this is hard to explain; honestly, it really does help to have a good understanding of the way computers handle information before you try producing art in them. But in your case, I would tell you to just keep in mind that, generally speaking, when your computer starts having to pass around numbers with four or five digits, (whatever they may represent) things can get a bit complicated behind the scenes.


The nexus is the portion of your memory that Gamestudio allocates specifically for "level data," which includes anything that is not specifically defined by your script. Blocks and entities, for example, are created by the engine when a level is loaded and subsequently discarded when the level is unloaded. Therefore, they are all stored in the nexus.

EDIT: I didn't realize you're actually an older computer engineer until I read through your post history. In retrospect, I'm sorry if my post sounded a little bit condescending, that was totally unintentional.

In addition to Redeemer's post, the reason why I said that you should use small(er) blocks is simple:
Take a small block (Add -> Add Cube -> Small). The shaded block will now consume a little amount of video memory (for the shadow map). When you now scale the block, f.i. about a factor of 100, and keep the default lightmap scale (Map Compiler settings), the block will take a hundredfold of video memory.

Everyone pointed out the correct answer, that I was trying to make a floor much too large. I just scaled the room down down a quarter of the size I'd enlarged it to, and it compiles and runs fine. I'm not a computer engineer, I'm an artist with a passion for computers since they came out with the first ones. I learned to program in machine language then because you had to. Now, I should know how to write Gamestudio code but I hadn't used Gamestudio since A6 and WDL, and skipped A7. I've been spending time learning endless distracting graphic programs with their own complexities, 3ds Max, Blender, Lightwave and numerous paint programs, all of which have a learning curve. I've finally realized that for my money, 3D Gamestudio is the best program to realize the applications I want to create, bought A8 and need to get comfortable with lite-C. Thanks again, Superku and Redeemer.