Visitor Center WIP Part 4 - Tighten up the graphics

I've still been fighting with Trespasser over this Visitor Center.  Lots of polygons are lying bleeding in the streets.  The UN has already denounced my actions but that's about all they're going to do and all they ever do.  But the actions of these terrorist polygons shall not go unpunished!

I've recently just started my third level using this mesh.  This time I had machf take a look at it an identify a number of things that I could do to solve the framerate problems that I am getting.

If you have been following my progress on TresCom you'd know that a LOT of work has been done on it since the last update.

The Exterior Front of the Visitor Center.  I have since added some white splotches to the wall texture.

  

Here's the main hall of the Visitor Center with the completed roof.

Here's a mesh I had started working on back when I began making the Visitor Center a couple years ago.  This is the Visitor Center tour, Genetics Lab, and Control Room area.

And this is a rather standard square crate.  I just retextured it to look like one that appears in the Emergency Bunker set.  This will be the standard box crate in my Nublar project.

I've run into a few areas that require some difficult decisions... At this point it looks like the rotunda may have to go without the skeletons.  And it also looks like the Visitor Center will have to be split between two levels for performance sake.

The biggest drain on performance seems to be the physics objects and how I went about making the building physical.  Seems that the CPU usage for calculating all those physics objects is what's dragging the FPS down to the single digits in places.  Right now the third level is entirely focused on finishing and optimizing the previously finished meshes and occlusions to attempt to boost frame rate.  Once the finished meshes are optimized and in the level I will begin creating newer and fewer physics objects for the building as a whole.  I will also work on creating new LOD meshes for many of the detailed models.

Right now I am using two levels.  VC - Alpha version with horrid framerate.  VC~beta - Beta version which hopes to correct framerate issues.

Since the majority of the plot for the Nublar project I'm planning is intended to be a prequel with some overlap with the movie, not have the skeletons isn't too much of a problem, considering.  As machf suggested to me in our communications - I can explain it away by saying they haven't set them up yet...  Though this will cause issues for those people who want to set up the Visitor Center as it was in the movie.

Perhaps in the future, patches to the game engine will increase it's efficiency and enable me to do this all in one level sometime, with full bumpmaps and dynamic lighting.  But that could be a long time off.

As soon as I get all the details ironed out, I'll give you more information on what my project is.  I was hoping to have some input from more of the admins but none of them seem to be interested in helping me out any except for machf - who has a massive workload of his own so he can only look at the progress and offer suggestions.