Some slightly off-topic things I've found:
In my test I used AddMesh. CountSurfaces() revealed that there was only 1 surface in the final mesh. This seems to say that AddMesh only creates new surfaces if the properties of individual entities differ from each other (from my tests, things like different UV coordinates, etc. cause new surfaces to be me created) but that's to be expected. There wouldn't be much point to AddMesh, that I can see, if it simply created a new surface for each individual entity. The speed hit would be the same, as instead of having 2000 individual meshes, each with 1 surface, you would have 1 mesh with 2000 surfaces.
Also, AddMesh doesn't seem to create a new surface once the vertex limit (65536 was it?) is reached. It simply gives an 'Illegal Memory Address' at Renderworld.
What I wonder now is how do other games/other engines work around the speed hit caused by transform changes? Tribes 2, for example, features maps with hundreds of tree meshes, buildings, infinite terrains, etc. and still manages to pull off an acceptable framerate. Obviously objects can be combined into single surface entities but with the transform change causing such a large speed hit surely there has to be some tricks or workarounds being used?
In my test I used AddMesh. CountSurfaces() revealed that there was only 1 surface in the final mesh. This seems to say that AddMesh only creates new surfaces if the properties of individual entities differ from each other (from my tests, things like different UV coordinates, etc. cause new surfaces to be me created) but that's to be expected. There wouldn't be much point to AddMesh, that I can see, if it simply created a new surface for each individual entity. The speed hit would be the same, as instead of having 2000 individual meshes, each with 1 surface, you would have 1 mesh with 2000 surfaces.
Also, AddMesh doesn't seem to create a new surface once the vertex limit (65536 was it?) is reached. It simply gives an 'Illegal Memory Address' at Renderworld.
What I wonder now is how do other games/other engines work around the speed hit caused by transform changes? Tribes 2, for example, features maps with hundreds of tree meshes, buildings, infinite terrains, etc. and still manages to pull off an acceptable framerate. Obviously objects can be combined into single surface entities but with the transform change causing such a large speed hit surely there has to be some tricks or workarounds being used?