What is the ultimate maximum size possible - the editor dimension limits?

[STiFU]

Doom3 levels were doing just fine with the 4k entity limit as well.

 

Yeah, but those were small mostly...

[OrbWeaver]

Yeah, but those were small mostly...

 

They were not that small when you consider the amount of detail contained within them, and the time taken to load (at least on my PC). Large levels will never come for free, and simply saying "Buy a new PC" is not going to be acceptable to the majority of users.

[Komag]

I wouldn't call mansion_alpha a small beta map. (It's a pretty huge, I'd say.) And all the original Doom3 levels were doing just fine with the 4k entity limit as well.

 

I hadn't tried out mansion_alpha until just now. To me it's not really huge, but more average. For instance, the whole map would easily fit into just one of the giant factory areas in "Lord Alan's Factory".

 

From north to south, mansion_alpha appears to take up about 5,000 units out of the max 130,000, so it could be over 20 times as long (and 20 times as wide), making the map a whopping 400 times as large an area. With that type of comparison in mind, I would say that we have a plenty large area to build in!

 

But the entity limit I'm still quite confident will be hit in no time by serious authors. It would be easy to crank out maps 4 or 5 times larger than mansion_alpha. It wouldn't be easy to make high-quality maps that size, but I'm just saying that from seeing what people have done with Dromed I know many will just push the upper limits a lot.

 

 

(and I always felt gyped by the very small Doom 3 maps. I would much rather wait 4 times as long for 4 of them to all load together as one map, such as (IIRC) the 4 separate "delta labs" sections )

[greebo]

Well, I'm not saying that we shouldn't raise the entity limit if it is necessary.

 

Let's see how fast our beta mappers will reach that limit and then we'll talk about that again. So far we have mansion_alpha with 2300 entities and bonehoard with about 700.

[Komag]

yeah, later is fine

[Spitter]

I honestly never found Doom 3 maps to be small by any means, but then I was comparing them to the Half-Life 2 maps which were absolutely miniscule.

[OrbWeaver]

(and I always felt gyped by the very small Doom 3 maps. I would much rather wait 4 times as long for 4 of them to all load together as one map, such as (IIRC) the 4 separate "delta labs" sections )

 

The problem is that it is not just a question of loading times, there is a very sizeable chance that a map four times as large will not work on the majority of machines, due to lack of memory or general poor performance. Unless we want the minimum specs to be "Dual-processor 4 GHZ AMD64 with >4GB of RAM", maps have to be restricted to a reasonable size.

[SneaksieDave]

Loading zone support, anyone?

[Komag]

The problem is that it is not just a question of loading times, there is a very sizeable chance that a map four times as large will not work on the majority of machines, due to lack of memory or general poor performance. Unless we want the minimum specs to be "Dual-processor 4 GHZ AMD64 with >4GB of RAM", maps have to be restricted to a reasonable size.

 

Ah yes, this is another aspect that will limit the mission size! Another thread mentioned the idea of how someone would have to let the mission load for 30 minutes, but what is loading? Is it loading stuff into memory? In that case there would be a memory limit, and how can we tell how much memory our mission is taking up/requiring?

 

What about texture memory? Does it need to have enough for all the textures in the whole map, or just the ones currently rendered?

 

Can the AI pathfind around a giant city or does this have limits too?

 

These are the things I'm theoretically wondering about

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

I think it's quite acceptable, albeit inconvenient for those who haven't upgraded yet, to require 4GB of memory and 512MB of video card memory in the near future. I have a cheap NVidia 5500 with 256MB and when the original 256MB RAM stopped being enough (can't remember for what) I added a second stick of 256, and now that that's not enough I ordered 2 1GB sticks. Minimum specs are specific to an FM, and history has shown that as time goes on, they are increased for new FMs. I played Calendra's Cistern with 64MB and 128 seemed like a lot. (couldn't upgrade then because the mobo accepted only ecc or something.)

[Komag]

Okay, I put on my nerd hat for the past couple hours and cruched some numbers...

 

I opened Dromed and roughly measured the area of each of the T2 OMs. The total area of them all put together was 3,536,050 square Dromed Units (DU).

 

If we assume that all three Thief games contained roughly the same area (I know that's a big assumption and not accurate, but close enough), that's 10,608,150 sq DU.

 

With 1 Dromed Unit = 12 Doom 3 Units (D3), that's 1,527,573,600 sq D3. There are 17,179,869,184 sq D3 units available.

 

That means that to recreate all the OMs from all three Thief games into one huge map would take up less than 10% of the available world space!

[SneaksieDave]

With 1 Dromed Unit = 12 Doom 3 Units

What's that based on? IIRC (I could be wrong), Dromed is set up such that 1 unit = 1 inch. Doom3 is approximately 1 unit = 0.91 inch (or 1.1 units/inch, based on assumptions of player height).

 

Edit: Either way there's still a lot of space. And I'd definitely like it if one day there is zone support too - it opens up so many mission possibilities (as opposed to being a needed crutch in TDS).

[Vadrosaul]

65,536? Oh God, just had a Snow Crash

[demagogue]

1 dromed unit is much bigger than an inch!

Garrett's dimensions are 3 units wide x 6 units high (4 units crouching).

If you make a door-way this size, he will just be able to squeeze through.

So most people got into the habit of thinking of 1 unit as about a foot (since a common height of a male is about 6 feet). Then the 12:1 ratio makes sort of sense.

Edited June 19, 2007 by demagogue

[SneaksieDave]

Well that's of course dependant on the grid size. Bump the grid size and you've got completely different numbers. The finest resolution of construction in Dromed is absolutely not 1/6 of Garrett's height. If we're talking about a Dromed community accepted term for 'unit' then that's not what I'm referring to (especially since I haven't used Dromed in probably 5 years). I'm just referencing the ratio, which I'm nearly positive I read somewhere years ago, about one of the reasons things look... well, "right" in Thief (as compared to say, Quake) is because they created a decent relational system where 1 inch was a basic unit (was it grid size 11 maybe?). That, compared to Doom3, is almost the same as grid size 1. Of course, in the Doom editors, we could also change the grid, to make it even less than that (1/2, 1/4, 1/8).

 

The only way to truly do a comparison of gameplay space is either to take it down to smallest grid and compare from there, or better yet establish what an [unit of measurement] is in each editor.

[Komag]

No, it has nothing to do with gridsize, units are units. I'm not talking about squares on the grid - those do get smaller and larger according to the grid size, as you say.

 

No, I'm talking about regular old Dromed Units, like the size of a brush in Width, Length, Height. The most common doorways in Dromed are 8x4 units, Garrett is about 6 units tall, etc. Quite a few of us agree that 1 Dromed Unit looks the same as about 12 Doom 3 Units. For example, the 8 unit tall doorway in Dromed looks pretty much exactly the same size as a 96 unit tall doorway in DarkRadiant. I've had both editors open extensively today, so I'm quite sure about that part of it.

 

Although I suppose it's possible we're just talking past each other in some accidental way. Also, many people would say that 1 Dromed unit looks like 1 foot, but I think it looks more like 8 or 9 inches. Similarly, many say that 12 Doom 3 units looks like 1 foot, but again I think it looks like only 3/4 of a foot. But either way the ratio is about the same.

[OrbWeaver]

Ah yes, this is another aspect that will limit the mission size! Another thread mentioned the idea of how someone would have to let the mission load for 30 minutes, but what is loading? Is it loading stuff into memory? In that case there would be a memory limit, and how can we tell how much memory our mission is taking up/requiring?

 

It is loading resources from disk into memory (models, textures, sounds, anything else which is "precached") -- this is why the hard disk thrashes during mission load.

 

What about texture memory? Does it need to have enough for all the textures in the whole map, or just the ones currently rendered?

 

You need enough texture memory to load all of the textures in the current scene otherwise the framerate will drop, however you also want enough memory to cache other textures so that you don't get jerkiness and pauses when you turn a corner and a whole load of other textures come into view.

 

I think it's quite acceptable, albeit inconvenient for those who haven't upgraded yet, to require 4GB of memory and 512MB of video card memory in the near future.

 

There will come a point where it is acceptable to expect this, but it won't be in the near future. You say yourself that you have a Geforce 5500 -- that is four generations out of date. The hardcore gamers that constantly upgrade their PC to the very latest technology are by far the minority.

 

I have 1 GB memory with a Radeon X850XT, and I certainly don't expect to have to upgrade to play Dark Mod missions (although I might have to boot into Windows since the ATI Linux drivers suck).

[SneaksieDave]

So you're talking about a term used, and not a grid size; understood. My guess is I am talking about the grid at size 11. And I assume for "Doom 3 unit" you're talking about the grid at size 1.

 

Suffice to say, "there's a lot of space." And loading zones would definitely be a welcome addition either way.

[OrbWeaver]

Aren't loading zones already supported by the Doom 3 engine?

[sparhawk]

Yes.

[Fidcal]

So with loading zones linking 3,1964 maps each of 50 stacks of 2 x 2 miles each about 200 foot high connected by teleports we can cover the surface of the Earth.

[SneaksieDave]

Is that confirmed then? If so, excellent; I wasn't sure where the topic had left off, and to be honest, I can't think of many (any?) spots where this is confirmed in Doom3. The one transition back I can think of (right at the beginning of Doom3, after 'all hell breaks loose'), is a new version of the first map, IIRC.

[sparhawk]

A loading zone simply means that you can trasnport information between one map and the other. And that is definitely possible. I don't know if it is implemented in D3 in such a way that you can easily do it, but it should be possible.

[Ishtvan]

Yeah, we would have to modify it a bit to save the state of everything in the map when exiting and come back to those states when leaving, but it should be possible. Maybe we could use a savefile on exit, and then when re-entering, load the save file and then write in any player data that's changed?

[ZylonBane]

For Half-Life/SS2 style "overlapping" map load areas, you'll also need a system for defining the area in which objects and AIs will be transported to the new map, and a system for tagging objects as transportable/non-transportable. You wouldn't want your deco objects getting cloned over along with any stuff the player's dropped on the ground.