Load & unload polygons?

[Qweasy908]

I don't know how Aleph One only loads part of the map the player is around instead of loading the entire map.

Does Aleph One load and unload polygons?

How does Aleph One load the map around the player?

What are map indices?

The maps are big and unloading hidden polygons would save memory.

[ravenshining]

It doesn't. The whole level is read and runs at once, not doing so would break the functionality of many, many maps. Some maps will refrain from activating monsters until you get near them, however, this is not a mandatory feature, especially with A1's increased limits. It really doesn't use much memory to do all that, this was designed in 1994 after all.

Maybe you're thinking of only rendering what's in sight? In which case, I don't know.

Or are you thinking of loading textures and sprites? In which case, it loads any required collections for the whole level at the start. However, since it loads on a collection basis, that means it does load a lot of unnecessary textures and sprites, which is a problem in some scenarios for loading times and 32 bit Windows builds.

[The Man]

As for map indices, there's an explanation of those here. tl;dr: you can only get away with so many small polygons crammed together.

Also, I got the impression that loading all the textures in each collection a map uses is not actually intended behaviour, but it's nonetheless how the Windows version of the engine handles it.

[Qweasy908]

Thanks for the answers to my questions.

I think the appearing and disappearing polygons has something to do with portal rendering when its culling hidden portals and polygons.

I found a book that has info about portal culling and maybe that allows overlapping polygons.