S&box Wiki

VIS Optimizations

What is VIS?

VIS is Visibility for short. It's important for your map to calculate visibility of stuff you can see or cannot see. It's not always great when a computer does it, so there are a few entities that may further optimize your map when utilizing them.

Useful Entities

visibility_hint is a point entity, you can use this to mark an area as "low-resolution" or "high-resolution" for VIS calculations. Low-res would be suitable for large outdoor areas with wide lines of sight. High-res is automatically used for inside places in your map (if your outside environment is marked with low resolution hints)

info_visibility_box is a point entity that is a visibility culling box which can be used to hide objects at runtime and can be toggled on and off by the entity Input/Output system. Mainly used to cull stuff that's within the PVS, but is in an area of the map that the player won't see.

info_cull_triangles is a point entity that is used to prevent overdraw from props/geometry sticking outside the regular map boundaries. You surround an area of the map that has props sticking out (which is usually out of bounds) with an info_cull_triangles box.

I hope this cleans up the poor documented nature of these entities. Use them for your own maps when optimization is your priority.