Documentation/Entity Types/Base/Zone.type
From NeoAxis Engine Wiki
| Language: |  English •  Русский |
Status: | Approved |
Description
Zones are a part of the Portal System. They are used to mark enclosed spaces. A typical example of a zone is a room.
When a camera is in a zone, only the objects within this zone are rendered. This significantly improves performance while rendering enclosed spaces.
A zone should not always be like a nailed box. Rooms do normally have windows, doors and other apertures. In the Portal System portals are used to create such apertures.
We would like to point out that a zone can only be of a rectangular form. Normally, it does not cause a problem, since any unrectangular room can be placed into a larger zone.
Now imagine: There is a round tower on the map, where one can get in. For the sake of increased performance you confine the tower's interior space to a zone. Since the tower has a round form, the zone has to be larger than this tower. Then, if you approach the tower from outside, you may get into a zone making everything but the tower's interior disappear. This is one of the cases when the use of the Portal System should be limited.
