New Map? - Discussion

[Pollux]

The Ranox building interiors look like something you'd see shitty Minecraft builders make - way too open and huge. Because of this I feel like I could not fully immerse myself, since you'd feel like a toy in a toy house. Unfortunately, I've so far not seen any maps, other than EvoCity, with at least somewhat realistic interiors.

If frames is what the goal of map changing is about, for the love of SoulRippah, please do not release a map without load testing it first with the gamemode. Changing maps hurts the server a lot, it's a big risk. Changing back because of performance issues hurts it even more.

Lastly, on the topic of performance again - source engine is not designed for huge open maps. It's pretty much impossible to get great frames on it. Try this:
1. Unsubscribe from all addons, remove all content
2. Launch Garry's Mod on any open map
3. Turn on FPS counter
4. Spawn as many bots as you can
5. Feel your frames drop the more bots you spawn

There's only 3 things to do about bad performance, 2 for devs and 1 for players:
1. Edit/buy/get a map to be less open. I know, it sucks, but having a huge open city takes it's toll.
2. Run FProfiler to figure out if any newer updates has caused server to lag. This is best done with many players online. I've used this method to figure out license plates as well as door texts causing lag in the past.
3. For the player - drop all your settings except model quality to the lowest you can. The difference is really substantial.

These things would be mostly testing the gamemode, not the map. For the map the only thing you want to test is exactly what it is drawing at one time. This alongside the textures is pretty much the only two things a map can do to improve performance (there could be more as i'm not a mapper, but I know these are pretty much the most common two things). For those curious, V2D has better performance because it uses extremely poor textures. I don't think it does anything special at all with visibility optimisation. 

I'm creating a benchmark of Ranox vs Chaos (seems to be the most popular two) by showing exactly what is being rendered on the screen while flying around the map and I should have that done soon. I think this is the only way to objectively judge the performance capability of a map without factors such as individual hardware and settings, as what is rendered on the screen will be the same for all clients on the map in a specific area. If you guys want more maps ask, but it does take a while so i'm not doing too many. I may include V4B1 as a base if you guys really want it.