No need to apologize for asking about feedback
The concept of the large map is great and I like exploring all areas and just driving around (reminds me of the original Midtown Madness, where I made up my own stories and reasons to get from one end of the city to the other). The diversity is welcome and generally atmosphere and immersion are well done.
Still, I find it difficult to actually enjoy it because of technical reasons. Performance drops by a factor of eight compared to default Carlswood for me, which means going from triple digits to under 30 frames. While there is a lot of detail and individual texturing, the framerate doesn't balance out with the visual impact in my opinion.
I can get it up to about 50fps by disabling shadows for most objects and solidifying movables, which allows mostly smooth driving, but then it becomes too flat, graphically, of course.
My suggestion would be try to simplify and unify things first of all. You can combine small mesh objects into slightly larger groups that can then have LOD added where beneficial. Many textures can be combined (all the separate billboards could be grouped into fewer files), shader materials can be massively simplified (if a lot of things use the same shader, why have several materials?). All that would make working on the project tremendously easier and more fun for everybody, it improves performance and makes it more futureproof as well.
It's a lot of work for sure, but better to do it now than dropping the project because it gets too tedious later (now?).
The concept of the large map is great and I like exploring all areas and just driving around (reminds me of the original Midtown Madness, where I made up my own stories and reasons to get from one end of the city to the other). The diversity is welcome and generally atmosphere and immersion are well done.
Still, I find it difficult to actually enjoy it because of technical reasons. Performance drops by a factor of eight compared to default Carlswood for me, which means going from triple digits to under 30 frames. While there is a lot of detail and individual texturing, the framerate doesn't balance out with the visual impact in my opinion.
I can get it up to about 50fps by disabling shadows for most objects and solidifying movables, which allows mostly smooth driving, but then it becomes too flat, graphically, of course.
My suggestion would be try to simplify and unify things first of all. You can combine small mesh objects into slightly larger groups that can then have LOD added where beneficial. Many textures can be combined (all the separate billboards could be grouped into fewer files), shader materials can be massively simplified (if a lot of things use the same shader, why have several materials?). All that would make working on the project tremendously easier and more fun for everybody, it improves performance and makes it more futureproof as well.
It's a lot of work for sure, but better to do it now than dropping the project because it gets too tedious later (now?).