OSM culling and occlusion

Being an artist, I don't get to play with the inner workings of the source code or the Scene loader.

I was looking at a thread about someones low performance and was concerned about some of the posts made by Xavier , this one in particular.

So it's drawing everything within the clip limit regardless of its visibility (the OSM and TSM do not do visibility culling in software). What scene manager are you using? TSM I assume?

If the scene loader doesn't have very efficient culling, or you have to piggy back it with another scene loader or something, what would you suggest I tell the coders I am working with, in order to get the best scene management.

Or am I misunderstanding what Xavier said? Which seems to be that the scene loader doesn't manage culling of off camera objects well.

scene loader and scene manager are 2 different things. It's not OSM's job.
Also depends on the type of scene, vast, open, corridors etc. Eg our race tracks really wouldn't benefit from occlusion culling because they're totally open and OC has an initial performance hit that get recovered with highly occlued scenes.
The PLSM has various real OC techniques enabled btw.

ok thats what I thought, but got confused. Thought it was strange since the OSM file includes the option to choose one of several scene manager flags that get exported with the scene.

THanks for clearing that up though

That is because with OSM scenes, you are not tied to a single scene manager or a single scene manager technique, you can create and export the scenes with, and for, any scene manager you need, that is why you have full control over the active scene manager (i.e. you can use the Terrain Scene Manager, or the Octree SM, even custom scene managers with any custom additional data needed)