Level Design What is it that creates a laggy map?

[C_Gibby]

What the title says ^

I'm thinking of making a large map at some point, but naturally, I don't want it to be laggy. I want to reduce all the lag. I imagine that KF uses a draw distance kind of thing that helps increase performance by not rendering static meshes and terrain, but that leaves me with the questions:

• What shouldn't I do when making a map?
• What can I do to reduce lag?

 

[YoYoBatty]

Always set cull distance, zone as many rooms as possible (if it's an indoor map), use anti-portal's as much as you can in large bsp objects/terrain(if it's an outdoor map), reduce the max particles on emitters to as low as you can, in build options set the lightmap quality or compression from DXT3 to RGB8(it looks nicer, makes your map smaller, and slightly increases performance), compressing your "mylevel" textures to DXT1 or DXT3 is strongly recommended as it reduces file size and saves a hint of a performance. Another thing you might wanna do is disable collision on objects that you won't touch and/or fire your gun at such as papers on the ground, blood stains, those electrical wires you see in biolabs, et cetera. Another good thing wud be turning off the bshadowcast or bcastsshadows in default properties of staticmeshes that don't really need shadows. I hope you found this useful cause I certainly did.

 

[Fel]

• What shouldn't I do when making a map?
• What can I do to reduce lag?

you want to make a fast running map? Here is my Tutorial/Checklist on optimizing

http://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/showthread.php?t=42199

lol nice yoyo

 

[YoYoBatty]

Wow Fel, I basically said all that.

 

[nath2009uk]

Wow Fel, I basically said all that.

Inorite, what fel linked doesn't even explain it.

 

[Fel]

Inorite, what Fel linked doesn't even explain it.

didnt say it explained it, its a checklist plus it has a tutorial for converting complex brushes

He wanted to know what causes lag. Not doing this checklist will cause lag ><

Or doing the complete opposite of the check list

• What shouldn't I do when making a map?
• What can I do to reduce lag?