Move scenery deletion and scenery destruction earlier

[Stonehouse]

Scenery deletion and scenery destruction trigger actions cause long freezes which are a particularly bad end user experience in MP missions. Typically these types of actions have to be on mission start triggers (because doing it later causes much more than just inconvenience to players) and cause a long freeze just after the players enter the cockpit. The Normandy map and WW2 missions are an excellent example of the problem. All the towns are modelled in a pristine pre-invasion state so making a post June 1944 mission immersive and believable automatically requires scenery destruction over fairly large areas to avoid the player flying over undamaged towns when the invasion and the advance from the beach head caused large amounts of damage to buildings etc. This results in a very large freeze at mission start and depending on the host's PC this freeze can go for minutes.

 

 

If it was at all possible these activities should be moved to before the player enters the cockpit - so add the concept of a pre-mission start trigger if possible so that the delay occurs in a less visible place and simply seems to be a mission that takes longer to load rather than allow the player to see it happen in game.

 

 

Or even better do away with use of triggers entirely and allow the mission builder to "paint" areas of the map with different levels of destruction or object removal and make it part of the graphic load up rather than loading it all up and then taking it away (which I assume is what causes the freeze).

 

 

Or perhaps by making towns and urban zones default to empty and provide different mission editor "templates" which can be placed in a urban zone that represent different levels of destruction or density of buildings for that area. I guess to preserve map authenticity the templates would need to be linked to a particular zone so that the correct damaged buildings are in the correct place. The "template" "static units" would then load as does any other unit. Not sure if this would impact later performance due to larger unit numbers than dedicated map objects. ie is a static object worse for performance than a dedicated map object.

[Boneski]

Yes I Am now just running into this issue myself...and it sucks!