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Tried searching for answers to both of these, but to no avail. Hopefully some of you guys can help as you did with my last issues, although my earlier questions were a bit more urgent.

Background: I'm putting in a small coastal north african/middle eastern city on my 2km map, taking up less than 1/4 of the map.


1. I've been importing basically all of the middle_east/city/city_buildings statics to see what I have to work with, and a lot, but not all of the buildings, have a version with the suffix _nl, for instance there's office_02 and office_02_nl. I cannot see any major difference between these two statics, or any of the other nl versions of statics. What does the nl mean? (I'm thinking either no lightmap or no lod, i doubt it means netherlands) What is the difference between the two versions? Which version should be used for the map?

2. Is there a "cap" on number of city building statics your map should have? (Not "can have") What is a good ratio of enterables/partial enterables/non-enterables for a city? (part of the city will be one faction's main, so I think most of the buildings there should be non-enterables since there wouldn't be much fighting there)

3. To give the illusion of a "larger" city, I plan to have the city extend out a bit into the surrounding terrain. The buildings out of the playable map would be non-enterable, of course, and I would include visual cues as to where the playable part of the city ends via road blocks/obstructions) My question is, would there be any problems doing this given the bf2 engine and server/client side performance constraints? The city is on the upper right side of the map, so it would extend out a bit into the upper, right, and upper-right surrounding terrain.


Thanks in advance,

Urban.

1. "_nl" suffix = "No Ladders". Basically I found when making Muttrah that BF2 has a limit of 255 ladders on any map and if you go over that, when someone uses a ladder the server crashes. For some odd reason clicking the "Disable Children" button on a building which will remove any child ladders the building has on it, while it visually and gameplay wise got rid of the ladders that where on the building, BF2 still thought it had all its ladders on it still... As such the _nl versions of the buildings with no ladder children on them needed to be made.

2. There isn't anything exact, but Muttrah is a good example of what you should aim for.

3. no, but it is a little bit of a waste but ye, no real problem with it. You should look into generating 1/2 or 1/4 sized LMs for the buildings outside the gameplay area too, getting small lightmaps as they get further away.

Thanks rhino, big help as always!


For #3, Is there anything I need to do now, while placing the statics, to prepare for setting up the lightmaps, or is that all done at once? (First map and doing sort of a learn-as-you-go process)

all lightmapping is done in the final stages.

Simplest way to get the statics on the edge of the map to have smaller lightmaps is to generate them on only medium and/or low LM settings, or for the quicker way, use photoshop to decrease there rez of the lightmaps once all of your objects have been LMed.

2. Is there a "cap" on number of city building statics your map should have? (Not "can have") What is a good ratio of enterables/partial enterables/non-enterables for a city? (part of the city will be one faction's main, so I think most of the buildings there should be non-enterables since there wouldn't be much fighting there)

Muttrah is indeed THE map to follow for the best bang for your buck, notice how enterable buildings are not all crammed together, but have non-enterables in between them <- an efficient design.

Cool, thanks to both of you!

That's what I was going for, spread out enterables among a larger ratio of non-enterables. It's helps that many of the enterables are either landmark buildings (mosque, TV station, large warehouses, etc.) or are tactically advantageous IE the corner buildings and the T-buildings, making them more likely to be occupied than say, a random shop or house in the middle of the street.