Sidedef Limits

[Lüt]

Uh, anybody know of any ports (either existant or in-the-works) that can load levels with over 30,000 sidedefs in them?

[Guest Psycho]

What level that you have has over that limit? BOOM, MBF, SMMU, ZDOOM, LEGACY, etc. might work.

[Lüt]

I have two of them actually, and a 3rd one coming up. They are all mine. I haven't released them yet. All the Boom-based ports so far (MBF, ZDoom, PRBoom, etc.) don't work.

[Guest Psycho]

I just remembered, there are some utils that get rid of extra sidedefs. Under the Utils section. Might work.

[Julian]

Lüt said:

I have two of them actually, and a 3rd one coming up. They are all mine. I haven't released them yet. All the Boom-based ports so far (MBF, ZDoom, PRBoom, etc.) don't work.

It's a question of level representation.
Basically, none of this ports will be able to deal with your level.
But it's strange a level editor let you have so many sidedefs...

[Grul]

I know that ZDoom (and the Doom engine in general) bugged out totally when I tried to run one of my levels under development. The level consisted of one large room (12000x8000x9000) containing the entire level. The bug was local to a small area where it seemed that all sectors was leaking into another, even though the sectors were closed in the editor. I tried to separate that area from the rest of the WAD along with reducing the size of the large room, and then everything worked smoothly. ZDoom seems to have limitations when it comes to level size, perhaps this has something to do with your problem.

And 30,000 sidedefs... That's a lot :)

[Lüt]

Julian said:

But it's strange a level editor let you have so many sidedefs...

Deep97 and WadAuthor...

Really, I thought anything that wasn't DOS-based could hold a near-limitless amount. The only one I knew of with real painful limits is WadEd (which I use for all my maps, thus Deep97 and WadAuthor to cut+paste the 20 or 30 sections together once the thing nears completion :| )

[stphrz]

I think you may just have to face the fact that you just won't be able to do the levels the way you want them. That really sucks though. I'd be interested in seeing them, intact, the way you had intended. Have you talked to any of the port coders to see what would be involved in removing those limits from the Doom engine? Are the levels just really huge or are you using a lot of Xtreme detail?

[Lüt]

No X-Treme detail. Honestly, there isn't ;) There was going to be some, like railties on subway tracks, but most of the map is just scenery, such as little ceiling lights and stuff. There is one part with a decent amount of 3D bridges which are on 32x32 grids, but each is only 64 wide so they weren't that big of a deal. You'll see 2 of 'em when Doom Millennium comes out (map22 and 24). They are just big, and I had some over-layered stuff, like, certain ceiling designs on top of other non-matching floor designs, and when you do that, the overlapping takes a fair amount of extra space 'cuz of all the merging lines you have to do.

Perhaps I'll eventually look into one of those sidedef-reducing/map compiling proggies, but not now.

[Afterglow]

All things, sidedefs, linedefs, sectors, etc. are limited to 2^15
or -32767 to 32767. If you compress the linedefs to your map and
try to edit it, the map will become totally screwed up with all the linedefs referenced to different sectors. I learned this the hard way and almost lost a map a couple years ago but luckily Jim Flynn saved the day and wrote UShrink for me. My suggestion is lower the size of the map. I bet it's just a bunch of repeating structures anyway.

BTW, Ben Morris must die for implementing a 8192 sidedef limit on DCK