So i figured i'd weigh in on this.. I placed a ton of those bricks and i'm very close to them. When in beta we realized Pavlov's needed some love, so i went crazy optimizing it. Over all you shouldn't even be able to tell the difference from 3 days before release to release except for the bricks. Days of placing every clump of bricks to perfectly align with the terrain the back aches, the eye strain..there is a lot of love there and possibly some floaters
. It was the last map we worked on so we had already committed to a visual style of bricks everywhere but when the call came in to optimize everyone pointed to the bricks. It's not poly's that make the bricks expensive its the draw calls..(the bricks are in groups of 10 so each clump eats up cpu and forces your gpu to wait for it) in some places in the map the draw calls could get crazy out of control where your trying to render 4,000 plus objects because the map is so open and all the buildings are open and every window is open and you can see everything inside..(this is why most games don't detail so much on giant maps) So my department started getting aggressive with cull distances(the distance at which an object is no longer rendered) and like i said the goal was to make it unnoticeable. Then as i was culling like a mad man everyone kept asking me if i ditched the elephant in the map.. those damn dirty bricks and i said no.. then they asked again and again until the decision was made...select all... delete...nooooooooo.. but fear not, every map update will not delete anything. I'm hoping that we can make the game look better in time not worse. as performance levels out and we polish up the bugs if I can help it the bricks will be back.. (for ultra only of course,I saved them don't worry)
so please guys enjoy the game, we don't want to loose detail either the environment team has been optimizing all maps again and we're the ones that really don't want to see things get deleted. i'm actually glad so many of you appreciate what we did enough to make and/or answer this thread. so for that I'm really going to try and resurrect Pavlov's ultra only bricks when we go and do another optimize pass on that map. And if we can't get it running better they might have to wait a bit.
Thanks for noticing the bricks.