I was working on putting further extra details in one of my maps and it turns out I'm hitting a bump in the optimization process.

The thing is that I have a camera pointing at a sphere lying on a sort of altar and if you enter the room the monitor will jump up. It's just a nice touch to show how important it is to the player.

Now when I had the first version of this map without many details and backscene scenery, it would be ok to place a portal on the surface in front of the camera. But ever since I made some detailed brushwork and added props and made the reception area higher, whenever I place a portal , the room that you see inside the portal is incloplete and is constantly in a state of being destroyed or rebuilt if you walk past it and look inside the portal.

If I disable the monitor for the camera, all turns good again and you see no glitched phenomena inside the portal.

However if you turn on the monitor again you'll see again an incomplete room in the camera.

I bet this has something to do with the world that has to be create 2 times for both seeing what's on the camera AND then the line of sight inside the portal.

Is there away around it ? Can I use a certain optimization process to prevent that the world you see trough the portals isn't cut off so much ?

EDIT:

Well, I made it so that portals in that area don't face the view of the entire room but only have to show a portion. That way I can keep the cam!

Make an identical copy of the room with the camera in it, or is this not an option?

RufusThorne wrote:
If I've understood your thread properly, I would offer the following solution:

Make an identical copy of the room with the camera in it, or is this not an option?

The monitor would still need to render both rooms, decreasing performance.

I would tie as many things as possible to func_details and incorporate area portal windows on the doors to your building at the entrances/exits. You could also try using a func_viscluster to draw as little as possible for your camera. Also try not to point the camera at the monitor.