Okay so i'm making a map and in it i have a skyscraper. I need a way for you to get to the top floor, and two or three others, it IS a malty-player map so i can't use elevators. And stairs, i'm afraid, if i put 30 stories wroth it will be to high-poly and lag the whole game. so i need an alternative. Anyone have any ideas?

Teleporters on several different levels where the play areas are? Make the stairs go up a short way then place a teleporter to next available level and have them appear on the stairs leading up/down to that level.
Edited by Dennis on Sep 27, 2011 at 03:00 PM

MULTI

But then you would still have the flash and sound. Is there any way to remove the screen flash, do you know?.


Oh i'm sooooo sorry that spellsheck didn't like that spelling
Edited by grunt_eater on Sep 27, 2011 at 04:38 PM

Not that I know of but so what the illusion will be maintained by the appearance in the stairwell and it's functional without having to climb 30 flights of stairs which would be boring.

IDK maybe just a trick of the eye in the elevator shaft instead of the stairwell. Automatic doors you walk in one and poof your on the next floor and the door's opening. and a sound effect when the door opens of a bell. I mean if you walk up one flight of stairs and then you're 13 floors higher it would kinda rune the gameplay. But with the elevator it would still be somewhat realistic

What do you think?

I think that works just as well. Maybe better.

Lol kk i'll go with that then, thanks for the help and inspiration :)

before you go full out consideration I have to ask, will the stairs be a stairwell or will they be visible from every level?

Good portaling and keeping a minimal amount of polies on the player screen at once helps a lot. For instance, If it was a stairwell, the stairs would mostly be hidden everywhere in the map until the player went through the door and in the stairwell, the other map polies would be hidden which would mean still minimal amounts of polies on the screen at once. However, if it was an exposed staircse, then that would be an issue. People *CAUGH* Hydrogen *CAUGH* will try and tell you that poly counts on a map actually matter when in reality they don't. That's why LODs work. They make it so the polies go away from your view when in reality the polies are technically maybe still there for someone else, just not for you.

It would be an enclosed staircase, but, i do think that poly count matters, why?, the more polies you have the more data is in the map, giving you a larger map size, the more polies you have the bigger your map will be. At least that was my understanding

As true as that is, model files even big ones are reletively small in comparison to any of the other data comprising a map. Usually bitmaps are what comprise about 80-90% of a map. It may make the map size go up a little bit, but relatively speaking one more single bitmap added to a map could do the same.

It could do the same, or much more, being another separate file of its own type, it needs headers I believe for HEK to acknowledge the file as a bitmap file.

Too many polys in the bsp, regardless of portaling, takes forever to export. Make a scenery of a flight of stairs. You can then make the bsp ramps and put the scenery on top of it.
As far as poly count goes, the scenery can be LOD'd in the model tag to only show up when you're close (in the stairwell), or use the render bounding distance in the scenery tag.
Edited by SlappyThePirate on Sep 28, 2011 at 10:06 PM

So you're saying that adding a staircase of 30 stories worth of stairs and two flights per floor and 9 steps per flight that's 540 stairs and each stair has, at least, two faces witch makes it 1080 faces. And that is less data then one single bitmap?

Quite.

Hmm, around 1k polies, thats around the 500kb to 1mb tag size.
Edited by XlzQwerty1 on Sep 28, 2011 at 10:37 PM

which in many cases for a good 512 x 512 bitmap, is less. or close to the same at least.

So why would i make the map that much bigger when i don't have to. i'll just go with the elevators and some secluded staircases here and there