Hey all, I've been thinking about going back to my Guardian remake and working to improve the framerate. As the map currently stands, looking towards the center of the map from the outer edges reduces the framerate significantly. The most recent forge update improved this slightly, but it's still jarring and unacceptable. I'd like to know if anyone in the ForgeHub community would like to assist me in an effort to improve the framerate on Guardian. It would be very much appreciated as I haven't been able to commit much time to figuring out a solution on my own. If you can, please post any suggestion that might help with this effort here in this thread. Thanks guys!
I can hop on in an hour, I like a little challenge. If you had to chose one thing to cut visually, what would it be?
I believe one thing that's really killing the framerate is all the trees and the number of lights around the map. Cutting back on both of those would probably help a lot.
343 just announced (Nokyard technically said it) that they are looking to compile a halo 3 classic playlist. You want to make sure yours is perfect. Skip some sleep and make it play well. Swap any detailed objects to be primitives if you can, make sure all objects are un-grouped also.
Psssssst... https://www.forgehub.com/threads/forgers-vs-framerate-how-to-tackle-framerate-issues.155379/
i'd also look at making those covey screens moved so that they are not all visible at once. Lowering them to the inside edge of the piece they are sticking to, might keep some of the visual appeal, while reducing the number of them visible at any one moment. Good luck! (I love this remake, even if people run too many players on it 99% of the time :O )
So I took out lighting, vines, fx, and all the trees and it still had framerate, so next best bet is piece management. I saw a couple ring pieces in the center that can be changed from 2 to 1 but I didn't want to try and gut it without you there. I'm not good with in game replicas so I wouldn't know what could or couldn't be sacrificed. Final diagnosis: Read ascends framerate article, find a way to take out at least 200 pieces, cut the lights in the middle by half, make the pair of fx surrounding the center into 1 each and try and simplify the background aesthetics (less vegetation)
try this for troubleshooting, that way you know the BEST option for getting best results. Save a new copy of the map wher eyou remove all lighting from the center of the map. Save another where you remove all FX Save anothe rwhere you remove a bunch (possibly at random) of pieces from the middle of the map. See which one seems to have created the best framerate. Now you know the biggest culprit of your problem. A combination of all may be necessary in th eend, but you will have your starting point!
Thanks for all the suggestions and help you guys! I have two finals this week so I won't be able to try any of this out until probably this weekend. I'm gonna put in a lot of time hopefully next week on the map to try and get it to a good, stable framerate.
make a different map. it's not possible to create guardian at a high poly count without framerate problems because the map is open and mostly blocks.
I have 13 Guardian maps to assess. The good looking ones ALL have frame rate issues. The overly simple (and kinda bland) ones mostly have good frame rate. Let me know how the changes work out.
the biggest shame (sham?) about Guardian in general is that there is so much going on visually in the middle of the map, and it is ALWAYS very dangerous to tread there. So, all of that gets wasted I still like the rest of the original map, though. I just never go through the (top) middle and rarely through the bottom middle.
I spent a few hours working on the map last night (on my LimeyStatue102 alternate account) and I found that you can use just a slightly wider/larger trapezoid for the door angles for most locations as you had four pieces for each side top and bottom, this took the doorway angle counts from 16 pieces each down to 4. I also found that one of the new Forerunner pieces fit perfectly to replace two of the floating supports over top mid and look like the were made for that section. I replaced the Top mid center posts with another Forerunner piece that significantly reduced piece count (need to adjust them still a little). There were also multiple Detailed Blocks as the back wall in Gold 1 and Gold 2, I replaced those with single primitives. I dropped easily 95 pieces from the map and it greatly increased the framerate, it did still stutter a bit though. I can show you if you want otherwise you can see it on that gamertag bookmark file for LimeyStatue102.
Ok so I've been working on reducing the framerate on this for the past 2 hours. Nearly all the maps detail is still in tact. The most drastic change to the map is what @fame28 did to the middle hologram pillar things. I've mostly just changed out pieces that cause less framerate and condensed pieces together. Didn't remove any vines or trees. Overall whole map seems pretty stable now. I can probably do even more condensing, but it seems like its pretty much gone so I figured id stop. Heres the map link Also I didn't bother to change any of the color or textures of any of the pieces I replaced, so you'll have to do that. Sorry
Make sure you thank the builders who helped in the description. Any idea when this map will be ready for review?
Foge if you edited after my changes, the lower bottom mid towards S1 needed to have the blocks replaced just before the railing. I forgot to mention I deleted that and didn't fix it (I was exhausted and it was late while I was working on it). I was gonna say that the detailed walls over by below blue room could be swapped to primitives and help framerate also a bunch. *The center hologram pillars are nice pieces to condense the object count, but I don't like that they were lighting up with white lights, perhaps a color change for those on the objects to a dark green or something would make them look better. Also I found some grouped objects out in the skybox (including the ceiling) that I ungrouped as grouped objects seem to cause framerate they say.
You guys are amazing! I just finished my last final and I'm busy checking residents out of their room to go home for the summer (living the RA life) so I'll get cracking on Guardian hopefully tomorrow! Thanks again you guys! I'll credit anyone who helped contribute in the map description!
I just looked at an old version (i assume) and fixed the frame rate in 2 minutes by simplifying the central platform and removing 2/3 of the foliage/vines. Let me know if you still need help.
It was mostly apparent from Snipe 2 to Gold 2, but also it needs to be checked from Elbow towards the map as that was where ball is held for most teams. (Dreaming of MLG Oddball on Guardian)