3D Mid Textures

[Veddge]

Why does Doom have a more difficult time rendering alot of floating mid textures than it does rendering alot of sectors? Floating mid textures come in handy to do alot of detailing, but they always cause a hit on performance.

[Quasar]

Middle textures, floating or otherwise, are the most expensive geometric entity to render in DOOM, far more so than even sprites. Because middle textures can interact with each other and with sprites, they must be extensively clipped into wall ranges and drawn (and in some cases redrawn) in a messy, piecewise, recursive process.

If you were to take out middle texture rendering entirely, the DOOM renderer code would be faster and a LOT cleaner, but you'd lose the flexibility of having see-through, two-sided walls, which would wreck everything ;)

I have wished many times that middle texture rendering could be made more efficient, but I think the code, as it is, is just about as efficient as it can get :/

[Veddge]

When Lee Killough was optimizing the source during the early port years for boom, it was apparently somewhere in the area of 300% speed increase to the renderer. Were middle texture code optimized in this housecleaning, and does Hexen differ in any way in rendering the same effect?