Z-Culling, Z-buffer, indoor portal renderes etc. speed up

[hybrid]

About the Z-buffer, sorry i thought (and read) that it is used for not rendering the things you cannot see. What does irrlicht use to do that?

Well, Irrlicht has a zbuffer, and it uses it for this purpose. Moreover, it can be used with multiple cameras (as I said), you just need to ensure some things... But there are also other things, such as frustum culling, visibility checks you could do on your scene, etc.

And I'm having some problems while multithreading, I'm getting segmentation errors. I tried to make everything local but I think its because of the shared Irrlichtdevice is there anything i can do about that?

Well, I guess everybody warned you about this thing, and no, there's nothing which would prevent this as long as you use shared resources from different threads at the same time. Moreover, the basic render APIs are not thread safe, hence you can only render from the main thread!

[Dark_Kilauea]

Nothing in the irrlicht API can be trusted to be threadsafe. You HAVE to lock a mutex before you touch anything in irrlicht, which removes a lot of the point of multithreading anyway, unless you have something substantial (like a custom file loader, not connected to Irrlicht except by a memory to memory pass during a lock) to thread apart from the Irrlicht API. I strongly suggest you get a strong handle on C++ development before jumping into the world of multithreading.

[BlindSide]

Was I the only one who voted NO?

(Still lightmaps are good for AO, but then its more like an AO map, or something)

[Mel]

As long as UnrealEngine III uses lightmaps, i will say yes Well, not like that, but it saves processing time you can use with better things like multipass effects and such.

[devsh]

wont you get weird shadowing and lighting results if you mix dynamic light and light map??

And can you point me to a thread or tutorial about frustrum culling and visiblity checks??? (I need that especially for my waterscene node which quaters my framerate)