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

[Sogun]

It's more or less known that there are some un-rendered triangles above the Dam in GE.
These triangles are floating in the sky above Bond's reach and facing up, so they can't be seeing ingame. They are also Secondary Geometry, which means bullets and projectiles won't hit them. Those lonely triangles are the only geometry in their respective rooms.

I don't know if it's been discused why are those triangles there, but my guess is that they are needed so you can have portals that render the distant mountains while Bond is standing on the dam, and covered portals so the port area behind the the dam doesn't render.
Since portals are related to rooms IDs and rooms need geometry to be created, Rare made some non interactive triangles. Rooms that aren't seen on screen don't contribute to drop performance, while unseen polygons in rooms on screen do. The dam is very high poly, so Rare came up with this method to reduce lag as much as they could.

Was that a wise decision or is there a better way using 'Visibility commands'?




I recently discovered something very similar in the Villa level in Perfect Dark. But this time is only one triangle and it is located above all portals. There are portals with that room ID (Room#5 that encapsulates a small portion of air, but I can't figure out the benefit of Rare doing something like that.
Actually, the portals in Villa are a disaster, I'm sure that rooms and portals can be done in a more elegant way and improve performance.



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Do you know of other examples in both games?

[SubDrag]

I think it's to set the calculated bounding box volume. I had not noticed it in PD, interesting.

[Wreck]

Ah, quite possibly, yeah. I've had to add a stray vertice to certain rooms in GE-X (which calculates the room min/max bounds taller). Otherwise, the room will unload and you'll fall to your death. Complex and Citadel are examples I can remember.