Limits of making maps?

[Hadrian_II]

Zylithan said:
I just made a map that was 10,000 pixels by 10,000 pixels. It opened up just fine and ran perfectly in dom3. (It was slow...

to be fair, the map was only 3mb because it was basically a green field with red lines and white dots.

I have made tga files that are graphically more intense, tgas were more than 30mb... those also ran with no problem (they were only 3000x3000 pixels... evidently the RLE compression does better with simple graphics).

So... neither one of those is a limit of any sort... I'm not a dev or a code digger, so can't give you an absolute answer. But... 10,000 x 10,000 pixels is pretty big I think pixelwise, (100 million pixels) and 30mb is biggish for a graphical file I think.

I think i might be able to answer that.

For a pic to show on your monitor, it has to be uncompressed in your ram, so its just the pixelcount that decides how much performance a map needs.

So a 10000 x 10000 map would use: 100 million pixels * 32 (or 16) bit color information. = 3,2 or 1,6 GB RAM space. and i suspect this caused your computer to start swapping, while the 3000*3000 map just needs 288MB RAM what i think fits in your ram.

[Zylithan]

my computer has 2 gb ram dual core.... the 10kx10k map did not cause any slow down at all after RLE compression. Before that it did (like, GIMP was prohibitively slow.... took minutes to save or make changes...) ... I don't know much about what that means, but it seems to me like graphical complexity could be important as well as just pixels. but... i'm just making stuff up

[Foodstamp]

So it sounds like the map size is dependent on computer memory then and not an artificial limit set by the game. Thats good to know . I only run 1.5 gig of ram so no 10k by 10k for me!

[Hadrian_II]

Hadrian_II said:
So a 10000 x 10000 map would use: 100 million pixels * 32 (or 16) bit color information. = 3,2 or 1,6 GB RAM space. and i suspect this caused your computer to start swapping, while the 3000*3000 map just needs 288MB RAM what i think fits in your ram.

you need to divide my numbers / 8 that the numbers become megabyte, now my numbers are in mbit. (what would make the numbers a bit less huge)