lag help

well from a quick look through of your map there are a few things i noticed. 1. you havn't deleted all the objects originally on tempest it appears, doing so will increase budget, and mean less objects on the map.
2. your arena has some nice outside aesthetics, but will anyone actually ever see these during the game? If not, then i suggest removing them, for less objects and budget.
3. This is probably the biggest culprit, you have alot of rocks and other forge objects right outside of the glass. From my understanding, the games engine has trouble rendering forge objects through glass, and it tends to cause lag. Therefore I would suggest removing these rocks from right outside the glass and see if the lag reduces, or is gone.

Those are just my quick observations/ideas hope it helps.

 

You might want to consider making it on Forge World because more people than you expect don't have tempest and it's never good to boot people from a party so you can play a map that could easily be built on Forge World. I know all the glass on there looks nice, but it's more important to make your map playable than to make it look nice, even if it has to be just grey coliseum walls.

 

Yes, they will. Those outside aesthetics are still being rendered by the game engine. Deleting them will likely free up a lot of budget, which is a good thing regrdless of how much money you still need. You see, the game engine has certain limitations put in place due to the fact that the Xbox doesn't have an infinit amount of processing power. The amount of strain an object puts on those limited game engine resources is expressed in the form of a single number (your budget). The more expensive pieces (ie. Lights, Decorative) are more expensive because you they have a lot more faces to render, or because they otherwise put more of a strain on the rendering engine.

Bottom Line: Every dollar saved is a little less lag to worry about.

 

This is not necessarily true.

Virtually every modern rendering engine uses some techniques to figure out what objects cannot be seen (due to some obstruction blocking sight of them), and optimizes rendering by simply doing nothing to process such objects. The various techniques used to do this are encompassed in the blanket term "hidden surface determination". Objects that you cannot see make virtually no contribution to frame rate lag.

Furthermore, budget cost is not necessarily related to the complexity and lag potential of an object. A Coliseum Wall is a very simple object -- a bump-mapped box, really -- yet it has the same $10 cost as a much-more-detailed Door. A $10 XLarge Bridge has glass and four or five dynamic lights, both of which make insane contributions to frame rate lag, let it's less expensive than the larger, flatter, and considerably more efficient Brace Large.

However, what you're saying is true for discoing. Blocking line of sight will not fix discoing; in fact, it will worsen it because you're adding more objects to render. Even if something isn't visible, lighting is calculated for it and it hence contributes to discoing as long as it's in your field of view (as long as you're looking in its direction).

That said, the OP should still consider deleting as many objects as possible to optimize their map's frame rate. In particular, I'd recommend replacing the rock floor just in front of the structure with an uglier, but simpler Coliseum Wall. The multiple Building Blocks used for the interior's flooring could be replaced with a Coli Wall as well, reducing object count and removing glass.