LE Massive interior, need help with optimization

[thumbincubation]

Clicking on the light bulb marker, holding S while sliding the mouse, will scale it up or down to some extent. If you want your lights consistent, you may want to create (duplicate/rename) your own custom light, so you can have just the right amount of flicker, control the shadow aspect, radius, power, etc., without affecting other lights in the game.

 

Radius and power setting will change quite a bit, alone, and then you can fine tune from there. As I understand it, shadow lights are more resource intensive than non-shadow lights.

[griever7x]

Sorry, I should probably clarify the extent of my knowledge and my intent or else I risk wasting your time.

 

I know how to do these basic things already, I've been making a lot of interiors for a pretty big mod project.

Having said this, the lights have such a wide radius for a reason: realism is a big concern and it just wouldn't look realistic anymore if I reduced the light's radius, so that's a point I can't compromise on.

 

Guess all that's left for me is to compromise in some other area, i.e. break that very long line of sight by placing a wall/obstacle and designing roombounds/portals around that, so that they don't render the whole thing.

[thumbincubation]

Ah, my bad.

[csbx]

I'm not a seasoned modder so bear that in mind; but here are my thoughts:

 

First--I appreciate the concern to optimize, but do you have any indications thus far that things are out of control ? Serious FPS hits, lagging ? Lights flipping on / off, texture weirdness ?

 

Would the interior cell not obviously be more optimized given that you don't have to worry about calculating LODs of adjacent cells ? Wouldn't an interior cell be generally more easy to control in this respect ?

[Di0nysys]

Thanks, I understand what you mean now.

 

I tested this in a new worldspace, and the problem I seem to be having is with lights.

The ones I'm using have a huge radius that affects more than one cell, and it doesn't look right...

Is there any way to preserve their appearance through multiple cells? Because otherwise a worldspace is not an option anymore.

You can apply an interior lighting template forcing off the global sun. This allows for shadow lights.

In the worldspace tab, look for lighting template, and select an interior lighting template.

 

Shadow lights don't work by default in worldspaces, and omni lights are switched off at a certain distance.

[dalsio]

I'm not a seasoned modder so bear that in mind; but here are my thoughts:

 

First--I appreciate the concern to optimize, but do you have any indications thus far that things are out of control ? Serious FPS hits, lagging ? Lights flipping on / off, texture weirdness ?

 

Would the interior cell not obviously be more optimized given that you don't have to worry about calculating LODs of adjacent cells ? Wouldn't an interior cell be generally more easy to control in this respect ?

Not really. LOD is a whole lot easier for a GPU to render, otherwise it would have to render the full-resolution textures of everything in the distance. The reason LOD is not enabled for interior cells is because it's usually unnecessary since interior cells are almost always such tight spaces that seeing a texture at a distance for LOD to take effect is extremely uncommon.

 

That being said, if you are in fact experiencing performance problems there's something to check and that is what resource is being used the most. Check your CPU and GPU usages while in the space. If your GPU usage is higher than CPU then LOD, fog, lower res textures, etc. will help. If your CPU usage is higher, then all those things will be useless.

 

As for your lights, there definitely should be some lights that you can use to prevent them from bleeding into each other. I'm not exactly sure of what you mean by, "affects more than one cell." Cells should be completely separate, if you're talking about light bleed from one region of the worldspace to another, that's different.

 

As Di0nysys suggested, shadowed lights should essentially "cast a shadow" of the inside of an area's wall so that it cuts off the light before it reaches any other areas. If not them, perhaps some sort of light-barrier placed in the void between the visible areas.

 

Another method would be to either physically separate the regions that you don't want light radii to overlap/affect and have a door that, instead of linking to an interior cell, link to another region in the worldspace that is far away. If not that, then you could create multiple worldspaces and have a door or portal or something warp you to that other worldspace.

 

Inevitably, without exactly knowing what you're looking at then it's hard to tell you what a solution is to a graphical problem. If you could post a screenshot of the lighting problems you're having and run some tests on whether cpu or gpu is a bottleneck, that would be great.