Room

Rooms are a technical concept in Goldeneye 007 and are particularly important to guards unloading.

Each level is divided into rooms: Every triangle of background that you see, every tile of walkable ground, is in a certain room. They are divided by Portals, which you can think of as windows between the rooms.

Broadly when a portal becomes on screen, and the room on the near side is loaded, then it also loads the other room (and then potentially further rooms beyond that). In certain laggy situations you can see this happening, particularly on Silo where you will see blue background for a frame: You are seeing through a portal where the room on the other side is not being rendered for some reason.

Guards can only move unloaded if both their current room and the room of their next target are unloaded, and loading one of these rooms causes the guard to load and lose any progress that they had towards their target.

Generally whether a room is loaded or not has the biggest impact on whether its contents cause more lag.

Rooms are critical to lots of mine throws in particular the one on Caverns SA.

Some of the level scripts test to see which room you are in to trigger things, often updating spawn locations for instance on Surface 1 and Streets.