Suggestion+Complaint: Map sizes and lightmap quality in 2020

[promarijan]

The year is 2020,

everybody has a highspeed internet connection, high enough compute power and storage capacity, and yet we are here in 2020 having our maps limited down to a tiny filesize at around 2 megabytes.

This is unacceptable when people on the same platform download mutliple gigabytes of titlepack files to then get greeted by low resolution lightmaps and limited use of embedded contents. Other games are decades ahead of this with multiple hundrets of megabytes in custom assets and standardized lightmap quality amongst the entirety of a map despite its increased surface size with .bsp source map files reaching up to 30mb with nothing else than lightmap data.

Maniaplanet has one of the most realistic lighting ever done in the history of video gaming... With it in the early years even being ahead of the triple-A movie CGI industry, and yet is being held down by file size standards from 2007.


The only real solution to fix this is to change basic map file size boundaries and up the limits to something that is much more acceptable in these years and especially for the future with the then upcoming next dacade starting in 2021.


The suggestions are the following:

Custom compute shadows quality option (in addition to Very Fast, Fast, Default, High and Ultra)
- Custom amount of bounces. (very dark maps will benefit from more bounces GREATLY - e.g.: 1-20)
- Custom lightmap image size option. (way beyond the current limit of 2048x2048 - e.g.: 4096x4096, 8192x8192, ...etc)
- Custom amount of compression to reach a certain file size of the lightmap.


Everybody can download a mapfile in the 5-20 megabyte range in a very reasonable amount of time, if not almost instant with 100k connections becoming more and more the standard.

While we are at the mapsize discussion:
There's not one problem with giving more room for content creators to allow them to embed up to 5mb or even more custom items and blocks, embedding images and sounds from and for the mediatracker would also greatly improve the possibility of sharing and playing content together, if that is what Nadeo's vision remains to be today.


Why again are Ultra lightmaps getting more compressed than High ones? Why are they getting completely obliterated once saving them to the mapfile in the latest patches? And why do we keep lightmaps cached for a map, which we already exported and embedded into the mapfile, so that we then don't use the intended one instead?

[Ville]

These would be awesome changes

[Dommy]

Still don't understand the reasoning behind totally scrapping the high-resolution lightmap file you compute locally for sake of embedding a drastically downscaled version of the same picture. The high-resolution lightmaps only ever exist in the map author's ManiaPlanet cache, they aren't even bundled into a title pack when you create one (isn't the purpose of a pack to provide a single bulk download for a set of local high-quality shared assets?), practically rendering the high-resolution lightmap file a waste of computing power (unless the reason it exists is for supersampling the embed lightmap file).

Considering the modern era and wide availability of fast connections (where 100 Mbps is considered a minimum nowadays), neither I can understand why a map file size limit cannot be upped to something along the lines of 10 MB, where 3-4 MB alone could be occupied by just top quality lightmaps, with rest of the limit being a free estate for GBX data and embed assets, such as items (and perhaps compressed skins, such as JPEG signs).

[Florenzius]

I agree regarding the Lightmap resolution/compression. I'd really love to see a little more flexibility here, at least for custom titlepacks.

[Harest]

Afaik Ultra lightmaps aren't usable at all atm, leading to stuff like this (at least with maxed settings):


I agree with all the stuff being said regarding possible improvements. My last map was very close to the limit (4MB here since it's the "real" limit on servers, i used OpenPlanet to be able to exceed the standard 2MB limit in the editor). I guess if you use Blender instead of the Meshmodeler for some specific blocks (twisted for instance) you will be fine, otherwise the limit can very quick be reached.

For the connections though, i think we could be surprised by how bad some are. France is very late on that issue for instance.

[TMarc]

That's not true. In France they have had gigabit optical fibre to the homes much earlier than in Germany for example.
Of course it depends where you are living and which backbone is available.
Currently I for example can only have DSL with 50MBit/s, no fibre, no cable. And this not very far from a big city. It's just an old outskirt town part.
Fibre will be available soon in the next street, but surprisingly not ours...

Back to topic: the lightmap question is interesting.
A map file could still contain a lightweight lightmap, and optionally an additional hires lightmap.
Then the mappers or server admins could chose easily.

[Miss]

Currently I for example can only have DSL with 50MBit/s, no fibre, no cable. And this not very far from a big city. It's just an old outskirt town part.
Fibre will be available soon in the next street, but surprisingly not ours...

That still allows you to download a 5 MB map within a second. That's not bad!

[TMarc]

If I really had 50, but the truth is that the average speed is below 25.
Certainly enough for HD video streaming

[tcq]

Actually, there are still many places in Germany that are happy when they get 384kbit downstream. Or alternately they have up to 20 mbit, but are looked into 20GB per month volume contracts for 30-40€.
Therefore I agree with everything that limits possible internet traffic (and think about that there are many players in Brasil/Russia/East Europe with not as good connections (even many cities in the US struggle to achieve DSL connections).

[TMarc]

Absolutely right