TGE (or TSE) for a city map

#1 By dozens, through a number out. 2 dozen? 3 dozen? and do you mean every building has an interior?

i think that might be pushing torque (at least "out of the box torque") farther than it can go. Perhaps changes to the code could make everything run more efficiently. Im not sure, im an artist, not a programmer.

I tried making a city when i first starting messing with the torque demo. Ill say this: Its not easy. If you are looking to make a vast, detailed city, you are probably better off modding grand theft auto or something like that.

Can any of the programmers here say anything to this? Are there changes you could make to the code that would facilitate doing something like this.

#2 If you are willing to build fairly aggressive LOD into your buildings, having dozens on the screen probably wouldn't hurt you too much.

The key is heavy portalization and removal of the interiors at smaller LOD's.

Thats just the art half, though. I am sure that there could be code optimizations as well.

#3 We came across a similar problem when faced with creating a large city area. We tried to add buildings individually to the world editor, which came to a lot. We ended up with a lightmap file a little over 2mb and took over 10 minutes to load...not cool. On the up side, our performance in the game was quite good (keep in mind that these buildings didn't have interiors), and our city was quite big.

Alex gave good advice about beign agresive with LOD. I would also like to add that you might want to make your city in fair-sized sections, or city blocks to help cut down on load times.

#4 The good thing is you can have fairly detailed indoor areas that will not render when portaled off. :)

Everything inside the unseen portal area is occluded, and when your inside, everything unseen outside is occluded. Very nifty if you still want detailed interiors in a city.

Although a downside (as mentioned above) is the calculation of the lightmap.

#5 Thanks to all for the reply.

My intention is, primarily, to NOT make a city map, but my partners (like me) have a big experience in mapping for Q3 (Medal of Honor) and when they saw the DIF process, how it works, they got really scared ("How we're gonna map? The buildings are models?")...

So, as I had no answers, I decided to ask you guys what do you think. Our primarily idea (we have dozens of stories) is to make a game where we'll use both outdoor and indoor enviroments. Outdoor really seems to be amazing in TGE (when they saw the demo w/ that huge terrain and a high fps they got crazy), our only concern in the indoor maps, like a huge palace w/ dozens of rooms and basicaly no outdoor.

So it's possible on TGE, right? Just keep in mind that most of the rooms will have no doors to seal from the outside, it's quite wide open...Actually (I have no reasons to hide our story), our current plot is developed in the ancient Rome, so we have lots of outdoor schetches (sp?) and I'm sure TGE will handle it, but our indoors maps are a big concern. Imagine an enormous roman palace. Possible?

Thanks again and sorry for the bad english.

#6 One of the TGE demos show the orc walking into a big building with an open door. The engine is practically built for exactly that scenario AFAIK.

#7 If you set "allow lighting to pass through portal" to off, and have a leak-free interior, you shouldn't take any extra hit in the lighting phase.

#8 @Thomas: That building can be compared to a room in my perspectives. It's too small.
@Eric: I didn't understand...Can you explain? I don't think I'll be able to make a leak-free interior, as the roman palaces where basicaly open...

#9 Zone the map is the secret here.
It doesnt matter if you have open building,if you put portals on every single opening then no light gets in.
and you can use lightmaps to light the hole place.
There is no differns from building a moh map really.