Enclosed, unreachable areas

[grayman]

If there's an enclosed area not open to the void, w/o entities, and not reachable from any other part of the map, what does TDM do with it?

 

Is there a performance advantage if I punch a hole through to the void?

[OrbWeaver]

The map compiler does a 3D flood fill of the inside of the level, so in theory any fully-enclosed area which is not accessible from the main level should be culled. If in doubt, use r_showTris 3 to see what is actually being drawn in game.

[Komag]

If it's there when you are in game, it's probably not being rendered, as though it were visportaled, so it's probably not advantageous to punch a hole in it, but I can't be certain.

[Mortem Desino]

From my experience, even if it's unreachable, caulk, and empty, doom 3 will compile it as if it is theoretically reachable. Think about it: what if someone does a script call to transport the player over to that 'inaccessable location'? If Doom 3's dmapper had culled and optimized it away, you'd get a runtime error.

 

 

There would not be a performance advantage if you flood it with void; All that does is waste valuable compiler optimizing time. If you leave it alone and enclosed, dmapper will create useless *.cm *.aas__ and *.proc information that you'll probably never use.

 

(depending on its complexity) If you totally delete it, then you'll probably get a really tiny boost to dmap time and a really tiny boost to in-game performance.

[jdude]

If you have an empty room but the player cannot get to it because it's walled off then it will not exist in-game.

 

If you have a room with an entity within it that is still not reachable by the player, it will exist, but will not be rendered unless you noclip to it.

 

From the tone of the post it sounds like you may not understand vis-portalling completely so you may want to check out some our wiki tutorials on that.

[grayman]

From the tone of the post it sounds like you may not understand vis-portalling completely so you may want to check out some our wiki tutorials on that.

 

Bad assumption.

 

 

Thanks to everyone for the discussion.

 

I'm not on a hunt to eliminate unreachable areas. I was just curious how the engine treated such places and if there was a benefit to eliminating any that I happened to come across. Apparently any benefit would not be noticeable.

 

 

 

[stumpy]

if player cant get to it and there's no ai there, then covering it with a clip brush will stop collision and pathfinding data being written for it

[Mortem Desino]

if player cant get to it and there's no ai there, then covering it with a clip brush will stop collision and pathfinding data being written for it

I prefer nodrawsolid, myself.

 

But yes: that is spot-on! You can really cut down on map info with this (and therefore, performance speed and loading time).