Sangin - its getting there
Posted: 2011-04-05 18:28
Hey everyone, apologies for the lack of updates on Sangin. As ever I have been working hard to get this map out to you guys as soon as possible (work/life permitting). Thankfully I'm now getting close to the final stages, although I still have a lot of work to do on it before we hit release. A massive thanks has to be said to Rhino for his on going support for me on this project; for the last few months he has been working solely to produce statics/vegetation that I need to finish the map. Without him the map just would not be happening, so make sure you give him some lurv next time you see him about 
Right, where am I now with it? Well, I finished roughing out the Green Zone at the beginning of January this year. Since then my main focus has been on optimising the map to ensure it performs as well as it possibly can for minimal to no cost to visuals. To that extent I have replaced, by hand, thousands of trees and hedgerows. Basically the way the bf2 engine works means that the more objects you have in the map the worse it will perform. Logical, yeah, BUT if you take say six trees, so six individual objects, weld them together and export them as one object and then put that one object in, despite having the same number of polys as six individual objects the engine will handle it a lot better. Now if I'd known this earlier in the development of the map, I probably wouldn't have put 2 hedgerows down for every strip of hedgerow to make it thicker but would have asked someone to make me a new one (which Rhino has now done). So in order to maximise performance I have had to, by hand, replace thousands of pieces of hedgerow
Anyway, I've now replaced most of the hedgerow I will hopefully have to replace and replaced all the shrublines bar one. I am currently in the process of tweaking all of the fields, after which I will go through the map and replace a load more trees I've used as bits of shrub to break up hedge lines etc. Once that's done I'll do Bastion, sort out the surrounding terrain, and tweak bits and pieces then do the compounds and detailing.
Here's the minimap taken at the beginning of the year before tweaking, some stuff have changed but most of it wouldn't be noticeable in the minimap anyway since the majority of the work has involved replacing objects (certainly a contender for the most boring job in the world XD):
Here are a few more in game shots:
Right, where am I now with it? Well, I finished roughing out the Green Zone at the beginning of January this year. Since then my main focus has been on optimising the map to ensure it performs as well as it possibly can for minimal to no cost to visuals. To that extent I have replaced, by hand, thousands of trees and hedgerows. Basically the way the bf2 engine works means that the more objects you have in the map the worse it will perform. Logical, yeah, BUT if you take say six trees, so six individual objects, weld them together and export them as one object and then put that one object in, despite having the same number of polys as six individual objects the engine will handle it a lot better. Now if I'd known this earlier in the development of the map, I probably wouldn't have put 2 hedgerows down for every strip of hedgerow to make it thicker but would have asked someone to make me a new one (which Rhino has now done). So in order to maximise performance I have had to, by hand, replace thousands of pieces of hedgerow
Anyway, I've now replaced most of the hedgerow I will hopefully have to replace and replaced all the shrublines bar one. I am currently in the process of tweaking all of the fields, after which I will go through the map and replace a load more trees I've used as bits of shrub to break up hedge lines etc. Once that's done I'll do Bastion, sort out the surrounding terrain, and tweak bits and pieces then do the compounds and detailing.
Here's the minimap taken at the beginning of the year before tweaking, some stuff have changed but most of it wouldn't be noticeable in the minimap anyway since the majority of the work has involved replacing objects (certainly a contender for the most boring job in the world XD):
Here are a few more in game shots:
Since we actually had a go at it, at the lulworth lan last year 
yeah i would agree that the Right people know how to Tweak this game to its fullest potential lol . . looks the same to say the least but HEY true beauty is nothing to be rushed lolol .. i wouldnt mind if it took another year or so to complete since its been one of those things..... i still find it fishy that this update came out 5 days after April fools 
