From: jcaesar@mediaone.net To: Reply-To: ml@qoole.com Date: Tue, 10 Feb 1998 03:05:34 -0800 Subject: Re: BIG HELP!!! A map about the size of id's base1, that I did, with about 50 lights, 50 lighted surfaces, transparent water (flowing), and quite as detailed/complex as id's, took me 1hr to compile on an NT P200Pro with 128MB RAM, and 500MB virtual memory. I tracked it, and basically the amount of RAM used was about 150-175MB RAM. Your map seems like it would have to be at least 4 times larger, and I'm positive ID never used (my guess more than 700 lights and lighted surfaces) as many lights as you are. You can probably get farther by doing a couple of things... 1. If you aren't using NT you might try it. Win95 Memory handling sucks. NT will at least do a better job paging. 2. Get more physical RAM. 3. Increase your swapfile. On my NT I have 2 swapfiles. One is 200MB, the other 500MB (NEVER had a memory problem on this machine--just warnings, but the processes finished marvelously). On 95, choose to manage your own settings. Make your swapfile on your FASTEST drive if you have more than one. Also make it as big as you can--here's the kicker--make the minimum size the SAME as your max size. This means windows will keep the swapfile as one long ass file, BUT it won't get fragmented further than it currently is. (My win95 swapfile is about 150MB on its own partition). Also make sure you have room for the Q2 utils to create their temporary files on disk (some get VERY large). 4. See if you can QRAD with default values, or using the speedy values of "-bounce 0 -chop -nopvs " 5. Remove say, 6500 lights. Remember that for the default values of QRAD3, the bounce is 8 for EACH light entity you have. With 8 bounces and 7000 lights, you have a total of 56K bounces. If you were to go the recommended 40 bounces, that's 280K bounces. Now each bounce means more shadows have to be checked and created. If you're trying to light a large area, you may be better off increasing the minimum level of light on your level. 6. There may be limits in many versions of QBSP and the other utils, and many of them have been removed by several authors. Still, they were good enough for ID to make their levels. Basically, you are running into a memory problem and it seems to be one that can't be cached (why I recommend more physical RAM). > >> i need some big time help with the level compiling tools. i have a >> level that is rather large. it is just under 2000000 square feet and has >> like 7000 direct lights or something. the level will go through qbsp3 >> and qvis just fine with no problem. but when i qrad the level it of >> course takes a very long time. i have a p2 266 with 64meg sdram and i >> say after 8hours it gets to 7... on the second row and then gives me a >> bull shit line 'memory allocation error'. first off i dont know exactly >> what it means, second there is no disk caching when it happens (i was >> there for the third time to happen), and third it is repeating in the >> same place and i got 64meg sdram. is there improved bsp tools that may >> work for me? i used the plain qrad command with -v so i can see what is >> going on. no extra or anything.