Risen said:
If you understand how LOD, Line of Sight, and other things work, your map will generally fare better in terms of framerate. There was a reason why the remake maps use so many "cheater" pieces that are literally Halo 2 geometry - because Bungie had to keep the object count down to keep the framerate stable.
More authors should understand that there should be as few opportunities for any player to be looking at the whole map at any one point - Crown of Flies and Affinity are two examples where I notice that the author did a good job of preventing this.
Secondly, more people should use the advantage of object culling and use more "perf walls" to keep the framerate up, just sort of any solid feature in the middle of any fairly large map that blocks visibility will improve a maps' framerate. The hills and cliffs in Blood Gulch, the center wall in Avalanche, the central building on Longshore are all things that help keep frames up because they occlude larges portions of the map where the player is at. A lot of community maps try to go for wide and open with tons of detail but don't also implement something that encourages players to only view half the map or block parts of the map from view. This is why window pieces seem to create lag, because if you use them in place of actual solid walls, they don't occlude what's behind them (since they're clear) and just end up costing framerate instead of helping.
My first order of business when I came across a new map was to go into it in Basic Editing Forge and see if I could get the map to start discoing (where all the objects start flashing) in single screen mode. If it did this I IMMEDIATELY always notified the author that they needed to object reduce, because if I was able to induce discoing just being on a normal section of the map, it was going to disco in split very easily. If I could float above it as a monitor and it still didn't disco, even better.
I think what Bungie intended for Reach's Forge World is that they would let you make maps that push the game more this time around instead of Halo 3 where it was basically impossible to make a map that could hurt framerate, with tons more added budget and object count. They followed very stringent rules when creating the example remakes and maps (Asylum uses the most Building objects, and that's only 6 out of the maximum 10 - Hem uses 4, Pinnacle uses 4, and Cage/Uncaged uses 3).
So then we're stuck in a catch 22 where it's technically possible to Forge maps that work well in 4 player split, but most people want the maps to look 'nice' (both authors and players), so Bungie went for the 2-person-split benchmark, and even some maps are just going to encroach on that as well. Probably the hardest thing to get a few authors to do was object-reduce. It was like I insulted their mom and kicked a baby in front of them, but I kept the pressure on.
I have a saying that you should finish a map, and then realize that no, you CAN make it with less objects, so go back and object reduce even if you think it doesn't need it. The closer you are to <5000$ total budget the better:
4850$ - Asylum
2700$ - Hemorrhage
3130$ - Pinnacle
edit: holy shit this post looked smaller when I was writing it out :lol
