Decontructing Silent Hill

Possibly the most time-consuming aspect of this project is modelling. The bulk of the game is based in the main town of Silent Hill aka Old Silent Hill as there are a few other areas of SH I'm not including.
I managed to get an export of the town from an online community and have been using it as a placeholder for now. This scene is soo big that it makes Unity freeze fora few moments everytime it's selected in-editor. Which I can only assume has a performance impact when running.

More to the point... I've spend an afternoon dissecting this area for better optimisation and management. I now have everything seperated or grouped depending if its lots of the same object. this is so that I can re-model one to replace all (such as street lights etc), or unique objects like buildings, which I can easily target to re-model.

Originally this area has a couple of extra streets, but because the player will never access these in my vertical slice then it is completely pointless even having them in, especially since the fog will prevent them from ever being seen anyway.

Since this is such a large area, if I focus on it now and get it all re done then that is a huge portion of the project done.
The Cafe is complete and the only other area is the Alleyway when the player breifly goes to Hell. Gameplay and functionality is pretty much complete, with only camera angles needing to be flushed out later on.

Optimisation

While going through the process of re-creating everything I will have to optimise as I go. Because all of these assets were made decades ago the technology used then isn't the same now, so during exporting from the original source material much more geometry information has been either gained through the process or was allready there.

This example screenshot shows the difference between optimised and non-optimised. This particular model is the roads, the areas I've higlighted in red is the original geometry. The rest of it is what I've optimised myself.
As you can see the whole upper left portion ofthe view has clean lines and isn't cluttered with lots of tiny tiles. With this being a fairly large model, this does undoubtedly affect performance!