GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[bmw]

Is using extra visibility ever preferable to using portals in terms of in-game performance?

My cabin fever map had some serious blackout issues (or rather, partial blackouts) of which using extra visibility seems to have corrected; I'm curious what impact this has on performance if you link a bunch of rooms together in this manner?

[SubDrag]

I've been under the impression that extra visibility is slower than portals, although I have never actually proven it. Hopefully someone has more concrete evidence. As long as your framerate is acceptable though, of course, it doesn't matter.

But I've been under impression you always want to use portals, and just use extra visibility for those weird rooms or room spanning rooms to correct for spots that portals are impossible.

[zoinkity]

It is much, much slower. Visibility is a very complex system with its own registers, interpretter, blok memory management, and keep in mind it will sit-and-spin until complete with its task just like monitors. It is handled as exceptional behaviour and uses a lot of calculations to determine if one of its many conditions have been met before testing if any of those conditions applies to what you wrote into the microcode.

Portals, by contrast, are direct correspondance and immediate. Portal visibility is a much less intensive test and the results are not interpretted. If you see the portal the rooms light up. Very simple.
Also, there's a common subroutine to detect if a room is directly adjacent to the current room. This uses the portal index, since all portals connect adjacent rooms and it must have been convenient. If you use visibility, the rooms are not concidered adjacent or even the same room.

I might also add that visibility is so complex I haven't managed to work out most of what the types do. Many push and pull entries off data stacks.
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