I hope this isn’t too basic a question to ask, but, if I use hints, antiportals and structural brushes to create portals in a map, to control vis, I can control my r_speeds…but…is there a downside to excess splits in the bsp?
I see lots of maps that are well controlled in vis, through the use of the various techniques, but if, for instance, I have a map that is hinted to provide lower r_speeds but those hints are done with brushes entirely textured with hint as opposed to textured in skip, with one face hinted and many extra portals are created, will the performance of the map be affected, or only the compile time?
Logically, I would think that the engine must look at where the player is in the map, in terms of portals, and then calculate what the player could see from that portal. By extension, that leads me to believe that if you created twice as many portals as were needed to lower r_speeds as low as they could be gotten, that the engine would have to look through twice as much portal data to determine what should be drawn and this, by extension, would reduce the performance, especially on lower powered computers.
My question is does anyone have any data on this? Would the difference be noticable for most client computers? Or, am I completely off base? I’m not a programmer, so I have to rely just on logic. Thanks!