03-30-2011, 09:15 AM
There's a pretty nice outdoor map I often play in UT2004, called Lord Of The Moths. Since I like it so much, I decided to try porting it in Xonotic, especially given the lack of good outdoor maps it has. Mostly did it for personal use... but since I like to share what I do, I'm posting it here as well.
The original UT map is a community map, which is credited in the mapinfo. Don't know if the author (Fred Blair) would mind me porting it. Though given I remade everything from a scratch and credited him for the original design, I'm guessing all should be good.
Anyway, this is likely the first exclusively outdoor map for Xonotic of reasonable quality. I used patch mesh terrain, since that's the only type of terrain I believe in for Xonotic There are some performance issues, especially since the map has no VIS at all, given patches don't build any vis (yeah I know... a map without vis sounds horrible ).
Performance isn't that bad though, at least with few players. Maybe at some point I'll put caulk brushes under the terrain, so some vis can happen. I followed the way of the Unreal Editor really... which is terraforming a terrain, placing stuff on it, and not having to care about vis or hint brushes (wonder if that will ever fully happen in Xonotic someday). Given the map has many particles as well, performance is surprisingly good. At least when no one's shooting any guns
Some tips to improve performance on this map:
- The map has snow, which can take a bit of FPS. In order to disable it, set cl_particles_snow to 0.
- Set Particle Distance and Particle Quality to lower values (from the Settings - Effects menu). Not sure how much that helps.
- Most effectively, set Geometry Detail to lower values from the Effects menu. This reduces geometry of patches, and seems to improve performance quite a bit, with barely any visible loss of geometric detail.
Here are the map download links. Keep in mind you can also download it from the autobuilds page and switch to the branch mirceakitsune/mountain in xonotic-maps.pk3dir. If you don't wish to do that however, just add this full pk3 to your data folder (v1r1 of the map): link 1, link 2, link 3. Original map for Unreal Tournament 2004 here.
Please let me know what you think. And if you wish, please offer details about performance and how it works for you. This map is a great tester for large one-patch terrains, which is the road I plan to continue on for outdoor mapping. Thanks
The original UT map is a community map, which is credited in the mapinfo. Don't know if the author (Fred Blair) would mind me porting it. Though given I remade everything from a scratch and credited him for the original design, I'm guessing all should be good.
Anyway, this is likely the first exclusively outdoor map for Xonotic of reasonable quality. I used patch mesh terrain, since that's the only type of terrain I believe in for Xonotic There are some performance issues, especially since the map has no VIS at all, given patches don't build any vis (yeah I know... a map without vis sounds horrible ).
Performance isn't that bad though, at least with few players. Maybe at some point I'll put caulk brushes under the terrain, so some vis can happen. I followed the way of the Unreal Editor really... which is terraforming a terrain, placing stuff on it, and not having to care about vis or hint brushes (wonder if that will ever fully happen in Xonotic someday). Given the map has many particles as well, performance is surprisingly good. At least when no one's shooting any guns
Some tips to improve performance on this map:
- The map has snow, which can take a bit of FPS. In order to disable it, set cl_particles_snow to 0.
- Set Particle Distance and Particle Quality to lower values (from the Settings - Effects menu). Not sure how much that helps.
- Most effectively, set Geometry Detail to lower values from the Effects menu. This reduces geometry of patches, and seems to improve performance quite a bit, with barely any visible loss of geometric detail.
Here are the map download links. Keep in mind you can also download it from the autobuilds page and switch to the branch mirceakitsune/mountain in xonotic-maps.pk3dir. If you don't wish to do that however, just add this full pk3 to your data folder (v1r1 of the map): link 1, link 2, link 3. Original map for Unreal Tournament 2004 here.
Please let me know what you think. And if you wish, please offer details about performance and how it works for you. This map is a great tester for large one-patch terrains, which is the road I plan to continue on for outdoor mapping. Thanks