Run your radiosity through tool, not sapiens. Sapiens uses 200-300MB just to do the calcs, tool will use 80MB.
Also, if your poly count is too high, your screwed and must either buy more RAM or reduce polys. Check in 3ds/gmax by going to file->summary info I think, its one of the options there. The number of faces (triangles) should be 10,000 to 30,000 at the very most.
TOOL RADIOSITY EX:
tool lightmaps levels\mymap\mymap mymap 0 0.000001
^^ lightmaps = radiosity command
mymap = directory name where ur level is
2nd mymap = scenario name
3rd mymap = bsp name
(usually all three mymaps are the same name)
1st 0 = quality, 0 or 1
2nd 0.0000001 = stop point where tool stops and saves radiosity. Use 0.5 for a quick test, or 0.0000001 for full radiosity.
REDUCING POLY'S IN MAX
Use the optimize modifier. Go to modifiers stack with object selected, add optimize. Play with the face threshold (higher = worse detail, lower polys), the bias (higher = better detail, higher polys) and maximum edge length (higher = larger polygons allowed, lower detail, lower polys).
I would recommend applying the optimize to your ground - you may find that the complex ground mesh you showed me is eating up 10,000 or more triangles. Make sure 'preserve material boundaries' is checked, or you will get one monster of an open edge error problem.
Optimize will also tell you how many polys the object was originally & how many after. To check the quality loss, export your max file after optimisation, run tool structure, tool lightmaps & tool build-cache-file & actually play the game to see if your new low-ploy model is wack.
Hope this helps
