Map slow in UDK means map slow while playing?

[Alperce]

Hi

I've recently started building a map, and after applying quite some trees there's a clear slowdown when facing them. Is this going to happen while playing the map aswell, or is it just because of it being still in the UDK?

 

[ZeRoY]

It may have a FPS impact in game, best way to know? Try it

 

[[TW]Swag]

Most trees have a lot of transparency on the leaf sheets. If you get a LOT of them, you will end up with transparencies on top of transparencies when rendering. In this scenario, the engine will struggle trying to sort the transparencies. Sorting is the process of figuring out what should be drawn first. Since the transparencies tend to have problems in the sorting, the editor AND the game will slow down computing.

This is why jungle maps in Unreal are so damned hard to put together without making it a, more or less, tunnel map with the foliage minimized to keep the sorting issues to a minimum.

Take a look at the shader complexity in the perspective view of your map. If you see a lot of red or red with white insides, you have a problem. The white sections inside the red sections indicates that the sahder complexity is so bad that the spectrum has returned to white.

Overall, if the editor is sluggish that does not mean that the map will be at runtime but you should take the time to find out why the editor is running sluggish. There are tools inside the editor that will give you an indication.

Take a look at the page below, it outlines so really good techniques of profiling performance in regards to content and how to keep things out of the insanity.

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ContentProfilingHome.html

 

[LordGleedo]

Take a look at the shader complexity in the perspective view of your map. If you see a lot of red or red with white insides, you have a problem. The white sections inside the red sections indicates that the sahder complexity is so bad that the spectrum has returned to white.

Here is a single tree with shader complexity on:

And here is a bunch of trees:

Even the single tree has red and white! Should I be worried?

My trees are all currently placed by hand. Is there any performance benefit or detriment to doing this, or should I be using foliage/decal layers?