Castle Garden, my first map

[heartnet]

Hello.

I really want some cooperators to finish up my first map. I named it "Castle Garden".
I have been creating it since March 2011 but it is still incomplete.
Recently I am about to be losing the enough motivation to finish but I want to finalize and release it in public if possible.

Let me introduce about my map a little.
It is a 2 team CTF map, Red vs Blue and mainly for Laser snipers and ST sneaks.
I have been writing it only with a text editor, not with some dedicated tools like Wings3D.
It is because I am not a 3DCG artist/creator and don't know how to use it.
I attached a rough small picture of my map.

castle_garden.png (126.47 KiB) Viewed 1829 times

One of the problem is that FPS value extremely drops down on the specific place.
I guess it is because there are too many surfaces of the objects in the screen.
BZFlag client tries to render everything even if the fog is so dense or objects which are behind others.
If I continue creating my map and putting more objects, it will help the problem worse.

Excepting the problem, I want someone's help.
I have the rough complete image of my map in my head.
And I also have some informative pictures for it.
Firstly I have to complete castles then I will try to make a garden on outside of the castles.

If someone can help me, I would like to invite you to my global group and then you can see it on the list.
Currently I advertise it only for the members of the private group.
And I reveal the original source code of my map if needed.

Thank you very much for reading.

PS
I attached the original image that was used for the advertisement.

castle_garden_incomplete.png

(657 KiB) Not downloaded yet

[blast]

One of the problem is that FPS value extremely drops down on the specific place.
I guess it is because there are too many surfaces of the objects in the screen.
BZFlag client tries to render everything even if the fog is so dense or objects which are behind others.
If I continue creating my map and putting more objects, it will help the problem worse.

This can also happen if you have a complicated (flat) mesh that the tank drives over, like, say, a mesh grid. If you do have something like that, you could replace that with an alpha blended PNG file.

[ahs3]

If you use a lot of arcs and cones with a high number of divisions, this can cause a problem with a lot of them. On complex maps like this, it is usually better to use mesh simply because it uses less faces to achieve the same task. If you need help with using a modeler like wings3d. I would be glad to help. I am usually on irc.

[heartnet]

Thank you for replying.

One of the problem is that FPS value extremely drops down on the specific place.
I guess it is because there are too many surfaces of the objects in the screen.
BZFlag client tries to render everything even if the fog is so dense or objects which are behind others.
If I continue creating my map and putting more objects, it will help the problem worse.

This can also happen if you have a complicated (flat) mesh that the tank drives over, like, say, a mesh grid. If you do have something like that, you could replace that with an alpha blended PNG file.

My map consists of some basic objects. Does the problem show up even if in such situation? So how do I replace them like you told?

If you use a lot of arcs and cones with a high number of divisions, this can cause a problem with a lot of them. On complex maps like this, it is usually better to use mesh simply because it uses less faces to achieve the same task. If you need help with using a modeler like wings3d. I would be glad to help. I am usually on irc.

I see. So maybe I have to convert the objects into meshes. But I don't know how to do it.
So could you help me? Firstly I will invite you to my group and introduce my map a little.
In addition, I am going to contact you on IRC.

Thank you.

[Agent West]

Would it be possible to adjust the 'draw distance' so not as much is rendered at any given moment?

[JeffM]

All you can do is LOD with drawinfo.