Vague rule of thumb - if it's Single Player, it doesn't matter nearly as much. For a PW, I try to stay around 100-144 tiles max, mainly for loading times, and to stay under 100 places in interior areas (which just plain need more to get an equivalent effect), and under 40 for exterior areas. Those are, of course, VERY general rules, and we break them fairly liberally. Here's a spreadsheet I whipped up a while back for one of our devs to get a feel for what he should be aiming for in this regard. The placeables/tile ratio is probably the most informative number:
Placeables per AreaA few notes:
The Secret Chamber areas each hold a huge number of secret loot caches linked to other areas, which is why they're much higher on the tile and place counts. The majority of other tilecounts over 200 are from very, very old areas that predate my work on the mod (pre-2004), though some are new.
Avoid stacking too many non-static placeables near one another - you can create MASSIVE client lag that way. You'll also want to avoid placing too many non-walkable placeables in the paths of creatures. I have a delagging tutorial in the lexicon that covers stuff like that in detail.
As for NPCs, we generally spawn them in when a player enters the area, to avoid loading down the module. This is more important if the creatures in question are in the same faction, and INCREDIBLY important if the faction is or will be hostile to PCs, since the silent shouts generated by combat will create a lag monster from the pit of the Nine Hells. Again, this is much less important if you're builing for Single Player. If you want specific numbers, that's a lot harder, because much depends on the graphics card as well as the computer. Most modern cards will not be an issue, but some have drivers that don't play nice with NWN, and really old computers may prove to be the bottleneck in terms of either RAM or sheer processer power. We generally limit party size to 10 on HG, and spawn mobs of no more than about 15 critters at a go, but that's in deference more to bandwidth than it is client processing power (the more pcs in an area, the more bandwidth used - and not in a geometric progression, since the actions of each must be streamed to all).
LMK if you have any questions.
Funky
Modifié par FunkySwerve, 24 mars 2013 - 03:01 .
