It seems that the RenderWorld() command involves significant overhead beyond the poly count when used in windowed mode, but not in fullscreen. This explains why it made my editor choke, even after prelimnary tests to see if the technique was even feasible (must have been in fullscreen).
This means you can keep your staticmeshes as instances of a single reference, that you position, rotate, and scale. It also means you can set the lighting environment up on-the-fly for each static mesh! If a light and a mesh are nto visible to each other, don't use the light. Use the mesh/light distance and light color to fake a light range, instead of dealing with crappy infinite lights.
Hardware lighting is MUCH faster than manually coloring the vertices, and you can use specular higlights. This is great!
This means you can keep your staticmeshes as instances of a single reference, that you position, rotate, and scale. It also means you can set the lighting environment up on-the-fly for each static mesh! If a light and a mesh are nto visible to each other, don't use the light. Use the mesh/light distance and light color to fake a light range, instead of dealing with crappy infinite lights.
Hardware lighting is MUCH faster than manually coloring the vertices, and you can use specular higlights. This is great!