Map file too big

[XEnderFaceX]

Hi

My map, pl_badyard file size is 51MB, thats way too big

I had alot of AreaPortals and AreaPortals are expensive, so i deleted almost all of them and then i recompiled it with CompilePal, now its 52MB?! What?

im mostly using Frontline Assets

Whats the reason for this?

 

[red3pit]

IF you're mostly using custom content, then that's the case. Also, repacking is a thing.

 

[henke37]

Area portals are dirt cheap when it comes to the file size. What you read was talking about the rendering cost. And they aren't expensive there either. They are supposed to lower the rendering cost!

If you want to reduce the file size, go for the textures. That's not just the packed content, but also the lightmaps for all the brushes in the map. Correct use of materials without lightmaps such as nodraw and using the correct lightmap scale can greatly help reduce the file size.

 

[iiboharz]

Just for the record, 51MB is pretty reasonable, especially considering there's maps that come stock with the game that are around 80 megs.

 

[hutty]

for a fully detailed map, yeah 50MB is reasonable, although if your putting a map that big in map tests you might have issues with users taking a while to download it. (thats a 6 minute download for me)

The notes about areaportals on being costly on the wiki are probably from 2003 in regards to hl2, an area portal needs to constantly check which entities are visible in order to know what to cut, so if the checking process takes more time than rendering those entities an areaportal will slow you down. This is almost never the case, unless you have an insanely dense map or a dumb amount of area portals.