I started carving out a new mission for T2 but I'm not entirely sure I'm building the brushes in the right order. I started with a large area brush then started building the house inside that cube. Then started adding room brushed inside the solid house brushes. Is this how I should be doing this? No real problems yet but I don't want to get too involved if I'm going about this the wrong way. A Previous FM I made years ago I just carved everything out but that is super difficult.
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I've done several areas that way and it worked for me. Some of the more experienced DromEders create the building by carving it out of air brushes, but as you said, that seems more difficult. For me, that makes it harder to visualize what I'm doing.
There might be some benefit to carving it out, i.e. cuts down the number of polys or cells used - but I don't really know.
You can always use the Time field to adjust brush order later - this can be helpful if you are running out of cells. You're unlikely to run into cell limits unless your mission is enormous or has extremely detailed brushwork.
Starting with a huge Air brush and building solid inside it can sometimes be better for cell count than carving out "corridors" of air directly into solid, but your mileage may vary.
When you Optimize the mission, pay attention to the csgmerge report in Mono. This will tell you your current cell count:
The circled number cannot go above 32760. But unless you're getting close to hitting that number, use whatever building method you are most comfortable with.
Screenshots look intriguing. Keep at it!
Thanks for the info. I'll forge ahead with the current method and see how it shakes out. I should probably keep the mission small just in case.
I agree with making the mission small or at least something manageable. Mine is at 32623 cells, and it got to the point where I had to delete something in order to be able to put something else in that I needed. When you reach cell limits it can be bad if you aren't finished designing your mission.
Yeah, when I get to the point of hitting the cell limit, I would then start manipulating some of the terrain brushes' time settings and/or start consider whether or not certain terrain brushes may need to be changed to objects (ex: window frames, certain walls, railings, etc.).
Last edited by GORT; 31st Jul 2022 at 17:26. Reason: My fingers can't type worth a darn :-P
I thought with Newdark and other mods that the cell count or poly count wasn't that big of a deal anymore other than maybe slowing down a computer if the mission is super huge? But it's probably easier to manage building a mission if it's not super big anyway.
The cell limit was increased but only slightly. I'm not sure if the reason was ever stated.
Yeah poly count is not an issue - I think the new dark limit is something like 20,000 onscreen polys. If that's happening, you've got bigger problems.
The cell limit was only increased from around 26,000 to 32,000.
I don't think I'll get close to either the old or new limit on polys or cell count ... At least the plan is to build small.
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