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I'm looking for a solution to dynamically hiding walls that block the camera's view of the main character.

My game has just one character, and the camera is always fixed on them, and the character moves around the scene by themselves, but the player can swing the camera around (a bit like in The Sims).


I've seen games that have walls that dynamically drop or fade when a character moves behind them, but I have no idea where to begin with this.

I'm quite happy to try out a few ideas, I just thought I'd check whether there any commonly known techniques for this.
Thanks

Although my case is game-related, this is a general problem:

I have a 3D level, but the bounding cube for my level contains vast areas which are inaccessible by the player, and which I don't care about.

Now, I want fill my level with points, positioned every few units apart in each dimension.
At the moment I'm arbitrarily setting it to have 100 points in each axis (one million points per level), but that's obviously very wasteful.

I'm currently storing the points in a one-dimensional array, structured like: myArray[xScale+yScale+zScale] but I'm happy to change this.

So, what are my options for constructing a grid of points which only exist around relevant parts of the level?

Obviously I've considered just filling the none-relevant positions in the grid with NULL, but for each relevant position I need at least 32 bits of memory, and I really can't afford to waste that much on all of them.

Thoughts?

Many thanks