Spring RTS Engine

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.

simple textures for seafloor.

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

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.

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

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)

Beherith wrote: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

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

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.