Thanks for your help Cell. Much appreciated.

As a followup and, and since it applies to culling and frame rates I wanted to mention that by correctly implementing non-intersecting "detail" blocks I was able to increse the frame rate about 20% and decrease the build time from 350seconds to a measly 120 seconds. Very very nice.

Proper usage of the "detail" flag: This flag should be used on non-moving blocks that can be seen around. Things like fence posts, fence rails, telephone poles, anything that is a "detail" more than an object the player will be interacting with. Now the big rule with detail blocks is they must NOT touch another detail block. If you go to "build" your level and it finds intersecting (touching) detail blocks it increases the build time very dramatically but worse yet it really increases the number of portals. USed correctly, detail blocks reduce portals, increase the frame rate and help the build time.

Hope you find this useful.

PS: Just as an addendum to this, I found that by incorporating "detail" blocks into my _2 and _3 LoD WMB files I was able to boost performance even further. As an example, at the distance for _2 and _3 LoD files to kick in I am not worried about 1 pixel of space between "blocks" so I went and seperated as many of the blocks in the WMB files as possible by 1 pixel. I then turned all of the appropriate blocks into "detail" blocks. Please do some testing on this when you use it. Don't go around dissasembling the walls of your house for example In my case it was a wooden rail fence that was driving me nuts =) So by seperating all the rails and posts by a couple of pixels and turning them into detail blocks for the _2 and _3 LoD wMBs I dramatically kicked up the frame rate.



Mark