Reality Factory

Another way to use the area brush without having the frame rate drop while the door is open is to build an entry room into the building.
So that when you open the door it's just a small room so no big fps drop. Then when you cross the room to open the other door the first door has time to close so basically render wise you get Outside + small room to small room + building interior.

It's kind of like an airlock effect. Although I must say having terrain and not being able to look out of a second story window across it stinks. I think if the terrain is low-poly enough, along with farclipping, fog, etc. A properly designed level shouldn't need these kinds of cheap shortcuts.

I mean unless the building gos underground or there is some reason to not be able to see outside it's kind of an obvious game flaw that will nag on the player. I know cause it would nag on me about the first window I came too.

Another option as well may be to not use any lightmaps. Instead burn shadows into the textures. Yet that has it's price as well.

or you could set lightmap scale on the terrain to a very high value, like 20... or you could make the terrain a static mesh and use LOD (i think LOD works on smeshes)

when you make the terrain, do NOT use the collision that is made by the staticmesh itself! It will KILL your frame rate! Instead use a terrain made of clip-brushes (that is the same as your StaticMesh-terrain) to get the collision(BSP is still the fastest at collision) You'll feel the difference!

See? It works!!!

Terrain was made with NemsMegaTerrainEditor, exported as both map (made all brushes 'clip' in the editor) and 3ds.

The number in the upper left is the frame rate, i used Fraps, it's more accurate than the Genesis3d 'FrameRateShower'

I have a AtlonXP2000+ and a Geforce2MX

would a person need to use a source like Nems to make outdoor terrain, or does RF have a built in editor for outdoor leveling?

ty

You would need to use something like nems to generate your terrian. I have a tutorial I'm planning on making about making and inserting terrian.

ty sir

There is something you can do.

OK, lest say your building is a static mesh or staticmesh entity. (For fun)
Now for your windows just take screenshots for the inside rooms. Make only a couple of the windows open or see through and then build a really basic cube and use your screen shots as the textures. you could even put low poly versions of objects. Then do the telleporter thing. That is the good way. It will look like its the outside of the inside of the building and you can see in the windows and it will work best if you use a static mesh plane with a nice alfa for the glass on the windows to.

If you do it right you can make it look almost as good becuas you have so many limets on what the players angle is to see into the window. At very least you will be able to let the player know the they can actualy enter the building and such wich enhances the hell out of game play. I big problem I see with demos is that you cant tell what your supposed to do or where to go. You windows will help alot with that.