NWMax Tileslicer issue

Gribo2

Hello all,
I am trying to use the tileslicer in NWMax 0.8c and it takes a long time to slice a somewhat complex group. Did anyone encounter this issue?

OldTimeRadio

Been years, so apologies for being a bit rusty. I did the town of Megaton from Fallout 3 as a single tile group which, at the time, was the largest, most complex tile group for NWN...specifically as a proof of concept.

IIRC, the thing is that when you slice everything in a complex scene, not only do you "mess up" (to some extent) the meshes that are more complex, you typically generate a lot of extra triangles. Not only does it impact the CPU but the memory as well. There's a phenomenon where over a certain threshold, things get really bogged down.

My take on the whole tile slicing thing is...it's something that should be applied sparingly and not to all meshes in the scene.

What I did instead of slicing everything was slicing the underlying ground/floor geometry and only that. That's almost certain to be basic geometry, anyway. I believe I also duplicated those sliced ground tiles to have a set to use as walkmesh. What I did with the rest of the geometry was combine all meshes which used the same texture into one mesh and then linked each of those mega-meshes to the nearest tile which made sense.

This wound up letting me have my cake (slicing the tiles into convenient bites) and eating it too(keeping the structural integrity of my complex meshes).

Does that make sense? It might not work for you depending on whether you want certain tiles-worth of meshes to do stuff like second-story fade or whatever.

Hope that helps.

Gribo2

It makes sense, for 2004, when I sliced groups with a 2GB machine. Now I got 32GB and a much faster CPU and the slicer is bogged down. It used to run quickly, even for a relatively complex group. Oh well, manual slicing it is.