A question of complexity. | Forums

[rlmergeuser]

Im not sure if this is 100% correct but if you glue loads of decoration items together it helps to speed up the track.. like i said tho not 100%, i say this because i made a city map with a load of buildings in the background (not seed), and i kept on getting lag and red warnings at the top saying there was too many items in a area.. so i took all of the back ground items and glued them together put them on decoration only and it solved both the red warning and the lag.. i glue nearly everything now, makes life hard when you want to change something though! but does, i find speed up the track.

[rlmergeuser]

It must be the terrain modifications. It seems like you put a bunch of hills in the background. Try going into the editor and deleting all those terrain modifications and see if it changes your complexity by a lot.

[aWebDesigner]

Im not sure if this is 100% correct but if you glue loads of decoration items together it helps to speed up the track.. like i said tho not 100%, i say this because i made a city map with a load of buildings in the background (not seed), and i kept on getting lag and red warnings at the top saying there was too many items in a area.. so i took all of the back ground items and glued them together put them on decoration only and it solved both the red warning and the lag.. i glue nearly everything now, makes life hard when you want to change something though! but does, i find speed up the track.

I've always thought gluing things unnecessarily is the worst thing you can do. The biggest impact I noticed on complexity is like someone else said, the seed buildings and trees! The damn trees killed one of my first tracks. They hit the complexity bar pretty hard and will cause crazy lag if more than a few are placed close together. The pine/fur trees are not too bad but the other ones are very big hits. The terrain mods and rope bridge are also one of the few items where the individual complexity meter for each item is in the red.

Also, I saw a dev post saying that setting things to decoration will NOT impact the complexity meter at all. It DOES help with frame rate if there is an area with lag.

[rlmergeuser]

I've also heard that gluing ups the complexity, and that makes sense to my mind. Grouping, on the other hand, shouldn't affect the play at all, since I believe that only affects the actual editing.

[rlmergeuser]

Thanks for looking, just wondered if anything jumped out at anyone really. I used a few hills behind the fishing lake to mask the terrain there. Also much of the ground is covered in grass 4 which could add to it, I just never noticed the bar going up that much then I got to the mountain bit and thought holy !"#¤ how is this so complex?

There's a lot of floating dust 4 to look like fireflies, it could be that also. I'll look into it more, I made this thread at work as it was bugging me lol, being a printer I have too much time on my hands while the press is running haha!

Cheers!

Don't know if you know, but I didn't realize it until someone told me weeks after opening the editor. You can increase the size of the terrain textures by a lot, by hitting LB until you get the 2 horizontal arrows on your texture, then scale it larger or smaller with the triggers. That can help by just reducing the amount of overall items you use.

Also I had a similar problem in my track. I was trying to hide a lot of the base world in the back ground. It was a very big area. I was using hills and textures to hide the concrete. My complexity shot up and was nearly maxed out. I ended up more or less walling the area off and hid the background with a rock bridge. After that I was able to put a lot more objects in my track than what it was taking to hide the background.

I don't know if putting textures and terrain mods very far in the background makes the complexity meter shoot up anymore than they normally do, but it kind of seems that way. Because by now, it seems like i have used the same amount of textures and mods i was using to hide the background on or close to my driving line

[rlmergeuser]

Also I had a similar problem in my track. I was trying to hide a lot of the base world in the back ground. It was a very big area. I was using hills and textures to hide the concrete. My complexity shot up and was nearly maxed out. I ended up more or less walling the area off and hid the background with a rock bridge. After that I was able to put a lot more objects in my track than what it was taking to hide the background.

It might make more sense to handle this kind of situation by either using the area clear tool or just setting the object view distance down.

[Barrybarfly]

Thanks for looking, just wondered if anything jumped out at anyone really. I used a few hills behind the fishing lake to mask the terrain there. Also much of the ground is covered in grass 4 which could add to it, I just never noticed the bar going up that much then I got to the mountain bit and thought holy !"#¤ how is this so complex?

There's a lot of floating dust 4 to look like fireflies, it could be that also. I'll look into it more, I made this thread at work as it was bugging me lol, being a printer I have too much time on my hands while the press is running haha!

Cheers!

Don't know if you know, but I didn't realize it until someone told me weeks after opening the editor. You can increase the size of the terrain textures by a lot, by hitting LB until you get the 2 horizontal arrows on your texture, then scale it larger or smaller with the triggers. That can help by just reducing the amount of overall items you use.

Actually, its RB and I did not know that! So thanks man, that could come in very handy in the future! lol

[emcee]

Thanks for all the tips guys. One of the main problems is the terrain, having to use so much grass and hills to create the right type of environment. The problem with theming it on a Zelda game is that it limits what objects I could use to create the illusion.

I deleted some grass and extended it (learned this while making the river bed) but I had left a lot of the other previous textures in also. I have marked a lot of the off line objects as decoration only, and got the complexity bar down to around 70%.

The fact I used a rainforests worth of logs to create buildings Walls and the forest has eaten a lot of the space up, so I'm not sure I will have enough left to actually finish the track anyway lol.

Thanks for all the help lads really appreciate it

[rlmergeuser]

Also I had a similar problem in my track. I was trying to hide a lot of the base world in the back ground. It was a very big area. I was using hills and textures to hide the concrete. My complexity shot up and was nearly maxed out. I ended up more or less walling the area off and hid the background with a rock bridge. After that I was able to put a lot more objects in my track than what it was taking to hide the background.

It might make more sense to handle this kind of situation by either using the area clear tool or just setting the object view distance down.

Area clear doesn't remove terrain textures, like concrete or asphalt. I tried turning the object view down, but it was taking away the landscape and feel of my track. So i decided not to go with that. I worked out really in the end, because i like what I have now more than how I was originally going to do it.

Another problem I had was when I put a texture really far in the background, once I got to the driving line you couldn't see it anymore. The game will only render it from so far. So I really had no other choice but to do what I did. Well I guess I could have moved my entire track to another area, but that wasn't very realistic

@Barry- oops! I meant RB Glad to help, I felt the same way when I was told. I was like, that is sooo much more helpful!!!

[rlmergeuser]

Excellent mate cheers I'd appreciate the input

Terrain mods eat up a TON of complexity. My guess is those are the issue.