I've added Tuta, Superal, and cxomtdoh and sent them templates.
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Regarding lighting and performance issues. Hans Holo first brought up lighting as an issue on page 2 of this topic, and RachoVolker did just above. I too was worried about the size of the map, and after I finished my part of the map last night, I decided to do some tests.
I've come to the same conclusion as RachoVolker. If people build as compactly as I have, then it will end up being very copper heavy. While using Sunrise mood I didn't have any performance problems filling the grid of 36 with my track duplicated across the grid. However, because it was still quite dark on the lowest levels in the center of the map... I decided to also test Sunset. This would give us more lights on blocks such as the GP ones.
As you can imagine, more light sources means more light bounces to calculate on the fly as it introduces those blocks into the editor. Well, that crashed my maniaplanet while I was using the copy/paste tool.
Right now the templates are in Sunrise mood.
My part is 3380c at the moment. In Sunrise mood, duplicated over the entire map to fill the 36 spaces, I ended up with a map of 81604c in size. I was actually able to calculate shadows on it, and it was playable on my PC, but at the center of the map it was very very dark on the lowest levels, even though I had placed some lights.
Perhaps the most reasonable and logical thing to do would be to scale the project back to 25 builders (we have 21 currently, so we would still need 4 more builders). Having 25 would allow me to leave a one block space between each author's 5x5 section. This will enable me to add light blocks where necessary, between sections, in the final map, as well as allow more natural light in through these one block wide corridors between sections.
I've done some tests with the 25 grid layout and I was even able to use Sunset mood for it, which I think would be a huge advantage. The map ended up being around 57000c, which is big enough!
I'm sure a number of people will still have problems playing it, but I don't really want to go any smaller than that.
Therefore,
I'm scaling the project back to 25 builders!
Maybe in 5 years when we all have more beastly computers, we can try 36 again. It would have been cool.
Here's a screenshot I took today while testing
Shadows calculated on fast for this screenshot