Maximum size city...

[Anton]

Hello, everyone! I'm a starting level designer, having already created some maps (but IMO unworth seeing). Not long ago - & that's 3 years of retaining - I've got an idea of building a map with citiscape as the main theme with maximum dimensions i.e. {65536; 65536} to {-65536; -65536}. I've already started some sketches in radiant, but since I'd returned to old 1.3 from 1.5, all of them mystically disappeared from my laptop. So my plans concerning that:

A large city involving the following districts:

- Historical Centre. A mixture of medieval castles with gothic & classicism, palaces, monuments & so on.
- Business Centre. It would actually surround the historical centre, but lying a bit more north-east - on the islands. Would included various high-tech style buildings, skyscrapers, heaps of lights, neons, etc.
- Living Centre. Just a huge bunch of blocks surrounding the two above-stated districts.
- Industrial Centre. Ah, our factories, docks, etc.

Plus, I planned some more elements, distinguishing the city's style:

- Canyon. A large long valley in the south-west of the city.
- Forest. An enormous amount of trees in the north-west.
- Underground Railway (or simply Subway). It would connect all city districts, including canyon, forest & islands.
- Funicular overground. Only in business centre.



Although this idea has been in my mind of so long, I have never started realising it, till I came across PillCity map. I was inspired by it & decided to start immediately making the city with much bigger size.


However, unfortunately - & expectedly - I've come upon several - insoluble for me - problems.

1. System requirements. First of all, I must say that I have two PCs & one laptop at home, but all of them seem a bit outdated i.e. the first PC is of 2005 year construction, the second one is 2008 year construction & the laptop was purchased in 2007. Having noted the compilation time of the maps that are 500 times as smaller than the planned city (e.g. 5-9 hours), I became despondent. Can Intel Core 2 Quad processor help to reduce the complilation time of the city to at least 10-15 hours, for example?

2. Amount of entities. It's stated that the maximal number of entities per map should be 2048. But what if the city is going to be a night-city, so the sky would no longer commute for a light entity?

3. In-game playing. Finally, if I manage to overcome the above-stated problems, what about the game-speed during this map & how much time would it take to load this map at all? I know there are game such as GTA series & Far Cry that have even bigger dimensions but work well on my computers, but would the Quake's city be a bit laggy?


Waiting for your comments!

[monaster]

Thought for a second, you were THE Anton (skytown, gas station,...). Whatever.
Since I myself began working on a "city" some time ago, and temporarily dropped that project to be able to build some other stuff (someday I'll finish ALL of these projects, promise), here's a little something:
Quake 3 is limited by its engine and the editor is thus limited too (So you can't simply compare this one with GTA or the like which works pretty much different). What I learned from obsidian not too long ago is -hi there obsidian!- that your maps will reach their limits as soon as one crucial tool you're working with refuses to work even though another tool could handle much more, and additionally that it heavily depends on your very own mapping skills. So it can very well be that you're not able to compile a map that hasn't reached a value of 2048 entities yet. Correct use of clip textures can reduce compiling times more than you could ever have imagined. There are different tutorials available on the internet, a very good one regarding bot AI for example would be Cardigan's Power Room, if I remember correctly.
And to some extent, high-end systems can help reduce compiling times, but it's not the only important factor. Just look at some of the very old maps on lvl-world, you'd be surprised how fast some of these were compiled 5 or even 10 years ago considering hardware standards nowadays.
At the moment I really doubt that you could create a city with

max. maximum dimensions {65536; 65536} to {-65536; -65536}

.
I remember someone saying that he tried building one room with this size a long time ago and it worked for him so he could run from one corner to the other in something like 10 minutes or more, but as soon as you insert a whole city into a room like this it can easily happen that something crashes. A manual once stated that you shouldn't pass the 8000 and something limits while mapping in Radiant. I tried compiling one of my early city versions with GTKRadiant's 1.5.0 "final" compile setting just for pure fun on a 2GHz 512 RAM system and that took my computer more than 51 hrs before it shut down the process due to an overtime.
My guess would be to create your city in small steps and as soon as you're done with another small part or district or whatever, copy it into your main map to the other already completed sections. That way you can easily figure out at which point bspc2, GTKRadiant or the whole engine has a problem with your city.
Nevertheless, keep on mapping I'm eager to find out about similar projects from other people also trying to build a whole city.

[Anton]

Glad to see someone is interested.

Correct use of clip textures can reduce compiling times more than you could ever have imagined.

I heard of them, but my maps were just too simple & not much detalised to clip them at all.

I remember someone saying that he tried building one room with this size a long time ago and it worked for him so he could run from one corner to the other in something like 10 minutes or more

Yes, if I'm not mistaken the map is called 'gofast'. It's easy to count the exact time to pass a way of 131072Y & 131072X. The player's speed is 320 units per second, so the minimal time would be 2^0.5*131072/320 seconds i.e. 9 min 39 sec.

My guess would be to create your city in small steps and as soon as you're done with another small part or district or whatever, copy it into your main map to the other already completed sections. That way you can easily figure out at which point bspc2, GTKRadiant or the whole engine has a problem with your city.

Yes, but what if I want a multi-district city regardless of its size? Maybe it's a good idea to create a small one with tiny brushes, try to compile it, then test & only after that, if nothing crashes, try to expand it somehow?

And by the way, I already have the city's rough scheme with u- & o- ground lines, districts, etc & I even tried to introduce it to radiant (water, ground & underground), but during compilation it started to display hundreds or even thousands of errors, so I just switched it off.

P.S. I'm really fed up with these 1.3+ radiants. Four years ago I had 1.1, but it worked perfectly. Is it possible to have solid & opaque brushes in camera screen instead of stupid outlines?

[spookmineer]

I remember someone saying that he tried building one room with this size a long time ago and it worked for him so he could run from one corner to the other in something like 10 minutes or more

Yes, if I'm not mistaken the map is called 'gofast'. It's easy to count the exact time to pass a way of 131072Y & 131072X. The player's speed is 320 units per second, so the minimal time would be 2^0.5*131072/320 seconds i.e. 9 min 39 sec.

That is the maximal time (no strafing, no weapons).
Gofast is a defrag map, completing any defrag map in the shortest amount of time is the main objective.
Good times on this map are less than 4 seconds (start trigger is on one side of the map, end trigger on the opposite side - you fire a bunch of quaded rockets to a wall and bounce off of the blast).

Gofast is not on youtube, but here's a movie that gives an idea of how the speed is accomplished:
runphoton
Speed in this demo is approx. 1500 ups, on gofast it's in excess of 17000 ups.

[Scourge]

It was Gohuge.

[spookmineer]

It was Gohuge.

?

The mapper made 3 maps: gofast, gohigh and gohuge, all the same map really but different locations for the end trigger.

[Anton]

So I decompiled PillCity:

Total size: 131072x131072x70000
Terrain + City size: 21000x17000
City size: 8000x6500
The tallest building height: 6500
Number of brushes: 3867
Number of entities: 189 (only 2 of them are lights!)
Number of funcs: 19

Quite optimistic results, folks. I'm going to ask that Pill how much time it took him to compile all this as soon as possible.

[Kaz]

This is one of those mapper things where you one day suddenly aspire to create a city isn't it?

I tried, things get extremely buggy when you're working at high grid numbers (way off in a corner of radiant like -55555, -55555 or whatever. even all on-axis regular stuff will just disappear at random, etc.) At least in my experience.

[Anton]

Thanks for the info.

I decompiled Gofast as well:

Total size is 64000x64000x64000 only, which is not even the 8th part of the maximum volume!

[Scourge]

It was Gohuge.

?

The mapper made 3 maps: gofast, gohigh and gohuge, all the same map really but different locations for the end trigger.

Ah, had no idea about the other two. My mistake.

[seremtan]

sounds to me like someone needs to move to another engine. the UT3 engine seems to handle these huge cityscapes really well - why not try that?