Looking at them I can't tell a difference - I see they both allow ambient sounds (I always use a ZONE for reverb_showroom in a tunnel) and both allow for ambient light color. I figured you'd have a ZONE and portals on either end to allow things to render correctly. But if I can do the same thing in a portal that I use a zone for, why even bother with zones in the first place? Thx in advanced =)
Kinda like this: https://www.beamng.com/threads/zones-and-occlusion.41815/#post-917046 However occlusion zones at least seems not to be working in 0.15.0.2
Hey now! Good investigative work. I've done basically the same and came to the same conclusions. I just wasn't able to find any "official literature" about them and wondered if I was using them wrong or not. The whole occlusion thing is great, but I was pretty sure terrain was supposed to do that already no? Either way, if I am inside a ZONE (inside a tunnel) and I put a portal at the end, everything renders correctly. Without the portal it doesn't. So I have no issues, other than nothing officially explaining them.
Oh, that is kinda natural state of the affairs. You can find official Torque 3D documentation, which partly can work at times, at least gives idea how it might be. There might be more documentation coming in near future regards of map making as that was mentioned in one of the threads.
It's all completely acceptable as far as I'm concerned! Most developers these days don't give modding tools to their community, and it's such a massive shame. The amount of time I've spent building levels for games like Duke Nukem 3D, or Unreal, Quake, Crysis, etc.. only reason I ever played those games so much was BECAUSE of the ability to mod them! This editor is fantastic - especially now that I've finally discovered OBJECT transform instead of WORLD transform. I was placing guard rails with world transform, and pulling out my hair =D
