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I have looked into the outside visportals in the map. The visportals on the left/right of the castle are pretty good, I think they do their job well. The visportals in front of and behind the castle are strange, they don't help rendering in my opinion. Since I doubt they help with sound propagation too... it seems that removing them will not changed anything. Remove them all. If you have vast space without notable blockers, everything is generally visible from everywhere, and sound travels straight, then there is no reason to put any visportals. Another problem with these portals is that they seem to be intersecting. I think intersecting portals is a very bad setup in any case. Now here is the idea of what might actually help. It is a great luck that your map includes a fence/wall in front of the castle, which reliably blocks the whole castle in the mentioned camera shot. We just need to put portals in such a way that they don't allow light to go through this wall. To achieve it, add two portals in the plane of this wall: One huge portal just above the wall. From below, it should contact the top of the wall. On the other three sides, let it span over the whole map. One small portal where player enters the yard (goes through the wall). UPDATE: Actually, there is more than one entering, an each one should have its own portal of course. With such portal setup, anything which is not behind these two portals will be culled away, which should include the whole castle. UPDATE: A rough plan:

Zardy's Maze Zardy's Maze is an extremely challenging horror game where you must enter a corn maze in the dead of night. Your goal? Cut down the giant plants that have started to grow there. Equipped with a flashlight and an axe (they do not serve you as a weapon, stealth rules, and run too), you must brave the unknown... and survive as much as possible Minimum SO: Windows 10 CPU: 64-bit system, 2.5 GHz RAM: 4 GB Graphics: Graphics card with DX10 (shader model 4.0) capabilities HD: 200 MB free https://store.steampowered.com/app/1484800/Zardys_Maze/ Not very complex graphics, almost comic style, but scares of the good ones

https://store.steampowered.com/app/351510/Quiplash/

This might help, specifically the part about hide_distance.

Yeah, I wasn't sure how to place visportals in a large open area. The concept of visportals is easier to understand when looking at smaller rooms but I never had any luck trying to wrap my head around how they work with larger open spaces. I'm going to try what stgatilov has suggested and see how that goes.

I recommend Springheel's video series on mapping, in particular the video about designing your map with the placement of visportals in mind. From the screenshots @stgatilov posted, it looks like some of your portals are worse than useless. Portals are not a magic fairy dust that you can just sprinkle over your mission in a criss-cross pattern and hope that they will automatically improve performance — they won't (and might even make it worse). A portal which never closes, and does not substantially restrict the visibility of objects behind it, achieves nothing whatsoever. If you specifically want an outdoor area which does not lend itself to visportalling, you might need to consider other techniques for performance optimisation, such as reducing draw calls by simplifying models, reducing light counts and shadow-casting objects, etc.

It won't help in this particular scene, and most others

I love that bell ringing. Feels like it's used so often that it's one of these iconic TDM sounds.

Having a beer at the bier outside the barn at the farm. My WIP will probably go by the name 'Lucy'. It's too large to be a first FM. The architecture is the easy part, and even that's very difficult to learn. I'm only now getting an inkling as to what goes into "building vertically" - so my FM is flat. Couldn't be flatter if it were steamrolled. But then there's lighting, audio, scripting, building a captivating immersive story... The architecture is getting close to finished. Or so I tell myself. The main plot, the core objectives, several optional side trips, are set down in outline form so there's a stable foundation. Lighting is passable. Ambient audio is very rudimentary or non-existent. Storyline audio is non-existent and at the moment the story is told mostly through notes tied to starting/completing objectives, and to fx. There are no intro screens/video/texts yet. I don't know if I even can finish the thing. Hmmm, now let's see how that file attachment thing works to send the pic

It's been just over 2 years since I dropped Shadows of Northdale Act 2. Crazy to think how much time flies! Rest assured, I am still plugging away on Act 3. It's taking a lot more time to make than I had expected but hopefully the wait will be worth it in the end. My core focus this time around is on adding extra detail work to the missions and making sure the majority of the sections are of similar quality. While reflecting on previous missions I felt there were varying levels of quality throughout them and so i'm working to try and address that. That does mean my missions are taking longer but it should result in a more cohesive experience in the end. And another big focus has been on my stealth encounters in the mission. Often times in the past I had focussed so much on making a level and then figuring out stealth later that I forget this needs to be a stealth level first, and so while building Act 3 (and act 4) a lot of thought is going into how the gameplay feels from a stealth perspective, making sure it not only fits together and makes sense but also that the stealth encounters are fun and hopefully challenging too. Well enough rambling, time to get back to it. Here's another screenshot from the city hub in Act 3, just outside the players apartment home.

Already three years back, as I was playing various missions, I was gathering names and basic information on the various settlements the missions took place in (if it was clear the mission took place outside of Bridgeport). Here's a growing list: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Other_Cities_and_Towns In fact, I want to expand it again today. I've noticed a few new towns in some missions, so I will definitely reference them. In my own planned series of missions, I intend to reference plenty of the established towns and cities, even the more obscure ones.