Spring RTS Engine

I'm thinking about doing a V2 of Hotlips Redux. For the most part it looks like I got it all right the first time around, but the main complaints I've noticed is an above average amount of people getting a really shitty framerate right off the bat.

I'm going to rescale all the SSMF maps from 2048x to 1024x (which seems more typical looking at some other SSMF maps), I think that should improve performance, but I don't know what else to do besides that. Features are relatively few and low poly.

I know I can't make other peoples computers better, but does anyone have any tips for improving performance map-side?

You used 2048 for ssmf maps? Why? And yes, that would have a big impact on performance.

Download GPU-z.
That lets you monitor the amount of gpu ram in use as well as gpu load %. Remember that the whole map gets loaded into it, along with all the textures. If you do a /give all ingame and your gpu ram use goes above 512MB (providing your card has at least 1gb) then it is probably too much.

As a stopgap measure, I recommend .dds textures, because they use as much gpu ram as their filesize. All png and other images get decompressed and mipmapped. A non dds 2k square image will occupy 16 MB gpu ram.

People with shit gpus complaining is nothing new, 256MB is insufficient anyway.

All in all, its unlikely to eat too much performance by using uncompressed 2k images, SSMF is taxing for many peoples gpus anyway.

TLDR: get gpu-z, look at what actually changes your performance. Ignore whiners standing in the way of progress. Tell whiners to /advmapshading 0

EDIT: remove waterplanecolor tag from smd. It will stop water being all around the map.

http://springrts.com/wiki/Mapdev:performance

put into wiki, if anyone wants to clean that up feel free..

Solid advice, thanks behe. I converted all the ssmf images to .dds, scaled them down, and removed waterplanecolor. Some quick tests with GPUZ and /give all show a decrease in GPU memory of about 100mb. GPU load remained around the same, but I've got a Radeon HD x6850 1gb that's no where near pushed to the limit.