Map optimizations for smucks like me..

[cainchild]

Again sorry for posting in the wrong forum.

Assuming I won't be the only n00b flopping around in the dark I was curious about a couple things.

My comp is old and crappy, and on 24x24 and 18x18 maps performance tanks a little (as in stop frame) when I get up around 500 units.
Now here is my question..
There are alot of performance switches, texture opts and such when compiling maps. I am the sort that will tweak in the direction of performance whenever I can. In idiot new guy terms, what are the top 5 little things I can do when building and compiling maps that will improve their performance.

[knorke]

simple textures for seafloor.

if the fps dies because of many units i would think pathfinding is faster on open maps.

[zwzsg]

It saves more on map filesize than ingame performance, but making your map with already tiles aligned to a 32x32 grid (or maybe 64x64, I never know) greatly help the compression.

[Beherith]

If performance is your primary goal:
No features
No grass
And small maps: 16*16 or less
Map texture wont change performance at all.

[KaiserJ]

try hitting the "end" key ingame to reduce terrain rendering detail on larger maps... reduces the complexity of the wireframe, making it easier for your computer to handle. a setting of 40 still looks relatively normal but will give you back precious FPS

and yeah, map optimization affects compression, not performance (unfortunately)

[jK]

Map texture wont change performance at all.

I begin to think the opposite.
I have massive performance differences on maps with the same size (and features). I didn't profiled the cause of it but I assume it has something to do with the map texture compression. So better map texture compressions (:= less map tiles) may reduce the LZMA decompression overhead, reduce the memory footprint and also the reconstruction of the square map texture (<=1024x1024 texels in size) from the texture tiles may have a better cache locality.
Still these are just assumptions

[KaiserJ]

i would love to see a study/investigation of this... certainly i'd pay more attention to making tiling textures if there were a way to get them to improve map performance

[Beherith]

I would think best cache locality would happen with no compression- ergo everything is in the same block.
But wait.
When I fixed the scanlines in mapconv, I changed the tiling pattern: from line by line scans of the whole map to 1k block chunks.
If you would be interested in profiling the difference, I could whip up a comparison map for you.