andrewj
Senior Member
Posts: 1344
Registered: 04-02 |
DaniJ said:
Would you mind explaining the reasons behind your assertion that 192x192 units is the optimum block size? Feel free to get technical :)
Sure :)
Firstly, I use the term "seed" to mean a fundamental square on the map. The original idea was that they would start small and grow to accommodate their content, e.g. a seed containing a Spider Mastermind might become 320x320 units. That idea did not work out, but the name stuck.
DOOM's inability to align flats means that the seed size needs to be a multiple of 64 -- in order to make pedestals, ceiling lights and eventually teleporters to work without too much hassle. When the seeds were 256x256, the whole map was offset by 32 units so that the middle 64x64 area would have an aligned flat.
The basic idea of a seed is to have one thing going on in the middle (e.g. a monster or a switch or stairs) and upto one thing happening on each border (e.g. a wall, a door or a picture).
Since the main DOOM doors are 128 units wide, and some of the non-boss monsters are 128x128 (Arachnotron), then a seed size of 128x128 is too small. Also some pictures, like COMPSTA# and ZZWOLF#, cannot fit either -- you need a bit of wall on each side.
Anything above 256x256 is probably too big, you would need more than one thing going on in each seed to look good, which goes against the basic idea of seeds.
One reason that 192x192 seems better than 256x256 is not really technical, but aesthetic -- the rooms just feel more "natural" at 192x192. With 256x256 seeds the rooms feel a bit too spacious, dwarfing the player. (I actually think a value in between, say 208, would be optimal, to give more space for thicker walls and wall detail, but 192 is the closest).
With 256x256 seeds, a 2x2 or 2x3 room was OK (512 units is quite a large area), but 4 or 6 seeds doesn't give much options to layout the room. With 192x192 seeds, the minimum room is now 3x3 seeds and there are more room patterns that can be used. This is perhaps the most compelling reason for the 192x192 seed size, getting rid of the boring flat 2x2 rooms which were common before.
A lesser reason is to use a single seed size for every game. Quake has a face size limit of 240 units (due to the way lightmaps work), so with 256x256 seeds the faces from a seed would often need to be split, making the maps inefficient, hence Quake was using 240x240 as the seed size. Having a single fixed seed size would lead to simpler code -- prefabs in particular.
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02-24-10 09:03 
