/vr/ - Retro Games

For anyone who's proficient with map formats here: what's the exact status on the BLOCKMAP lump and how it interacts with UDMF? It's not very clear from the documentation or forum discussions whether it's read at all, corrupts the map, etc. (I know ZNODES is technically all you need, but several people mention that it is actually read even in said map format)

I've got a fuckhuge level that locks up the internal node builder for a good while when the map is loaded (subsequent loads seem cached and take a fraction of the time), so I'm thinking about manually generating the blockmap and throwing it in there, but I'm not sure if it'd be a complete waste of time or at all possible.

Another thing I'm not too certain about is whether having a lot of merged sectors due to shared textures/heights bumps up the time it takes to generate nodes because of the sector/sidedef imbalance (pic related), so if anyone knows whether that matters at all, it'd be a great help. Thanks in advance.