I am working on a map, and kitting it out with game modes, and as I went to put down my 4th KOTH Capture Plate, I get a message that the budget has been exceeded.
I look in my budget section of the menu, and it shows my FX Budget is at 114%…which I find a bit odd, as my map contains exactly ONE item from the FX menu.
Through process of elimination, I discovered that Man Cannons count against the FX budget…I have 4.
But I cannot place any weapons down either without triggering the same “budget” error. …so…do weapons count as FX?
All my other budget categories are at around 50% or less…so…
So the actual issue is that I have a large “Lava” section that is using the trick with the emissive blocks and reflection volume to create the glowing lava…
Problem is, if my FX budget is in the red, the lava doesn’t glow in custom games …
(Except in Fiesta and Tactical Slayer because it isn’t spawning in all the weapon spawns and game mode items, so the FX budget drops]
Without the LAVA, the whole fictional narrative of the map falls apart, so I have to find a solution…
I discovered the map starts out with something like 67% FX …
I think it’s because all the weapon spawns, vehicle spawns, game mode spawns, etc. count against the FX budget…for whatever reason…
It’s not just performance that can suffer. Not all FX will spawn if you have too many. This happened to me on the first map I map, and I had to dial down the FX count. I ultimately had to accept that the map wasn’t going to ever be what I wanted it to be, unless Forge got improved over time. That’s why in my second map A Light in the Black I only added 8 FX for teleportation, despite allowing up to 24 players, because I was afraid adding 24 would cause some to not load properly. Hopefully this can fixed in the future so the only difference is performance.
When I was building out my map, the budget started high. By the time I was done it was at like 150%. And I had been HEAVILY EDITING MYSELF on the FX used.
Like you, I wished there was a “drill down” on the FX budget that shows you what is using up your budget.
Eventually I figured out that those “Plates” that you put on Objectives like KoH and other zone-based Objectives… They take up a huge amount of FX budget.
They are entirely optional. I deleted all of mine. The budget suddenly dropped significantly… To the point where I was able to go back and finish my previous FX ideas without exceeding the budget.
All the objective plate does, is when someone is capping the zone - their AI hologram appears above the plate and does its little dance while the capture is in progress. I was willing to give up that feature for those objective games in order to finish by build within budget.
I FOUND IT DUDE!! You have to delete all of the Weapon Spawners, specifically those really cool 3d printer boxes. just have your items placed with normal weapon pads. the 3d printer boxes are a HUGE burdeon on fx budget. they are very cool but i can only spare 1 on my maps typically .
Also note:
Save the Game Mode objectives for the last thing you place… You WILL go over budget, but that is okay… Because there if you have setup your objectives correctly… They would not all spawn into the same match at the same time. Only the objectives tied to the current game mode/objective will appear at any given time. So when you add the KotH hologram pads… Only one of them is active at a time. The budget calculation does not take that into consideration when showing you the percentage.