Hello technic-interested Re-Volters,
as most of you know, I am doing my first map in Re-Volt (Spa-Volt) at the moment. It is a very ambitious map with a lot of details. At the moment, Spa-Volt has about 30.000 faces in Blender, and with the "normal" RVGL-version (Non-Shader version), I have on my fairly good computer "only" about 150-200 fps.
However, in the Shader version i reach 1000+ fps. But I know, that not everybody can/want to run the Shader version. Also a lot of guys with very low-end hardware are playing Re-Volt.
My goal is, that Spa-Volt runs as smooth as possible also on low-end hardware, with a visual appearance as good as possible.
So I want to know, what I can do to improve the performance. I have no good knowledge in terms of 3d engines/computer graphics, so Sorry for some maybe stupid questions.
- What is causing the most issues regarding performance?
- How do I know, how many polygons the track have? I only have the values with amount of vertics/edges/faces inside Blender - but some faces will be splitted into triangles, while exporting?
- The more polygons visible at one time while racing, the slower?
- When I have a big open room, it's not possible to use VisiBoxes - what other possibilities do I have to optimize?
- When will the polygons will be calculated by the GPU? As soon as visible, or also the ones in the background?
- How much does effects (like steam, waterdrops, waterboxes, rain) affect the performance?
- Should I avoid to have to many effects at one place? (For example: Place 10 spark generators at one place)
- Does lights have influence to the performance? Or is lighting only the brightness/darkness of faces?
- How much does the textures affect the performance? Does it make a big difference, if 256x256 or 512x512 textures have to be loaded?
- Does it makes a difference, which parts on a texture-file are mapped on which parts on the meshes? Can I optimize something?
- When will the textures be loaded? At the loading of the track, or as soon a texture is visible?
- Is it recommended, to use bmq, bmr,... texture files, for mip-mapping?
- Does the fog-values inside the track.inf influence the performance a lot?
- I guess mirrored surfaces are also causing performance issues?
- What else is affecting the performance?
- Any other suggestions/comments?
Ciao, Kiwi