I've just had an idea about loading a lot of different objects into a level -
If I have a single object, called BASE - it's loaded as a ANIMMESH and contains 20 child objects, each of which is centred on zero and is one of the objects I want to populate my level with. So, for example, BASE may contain 10 different trees, 2 benches, 4 cars etc...
Now, I store this BASE object and every time I want to create a single world object, I use COPYENTITY to duplicate the whole thing, then manually FREE every piece I don't want, leaving just a single child object behind.
Imagine that I do this for 100 trees (using the 10 different types within BASE) across a level at startup.
Would all the trees now be sharing one surface, despite being seperate entities with different shape meshes?
I've written a test program and this does work, but I have no way to quantify whether it's faster or slower than normal, or whether they are all being rendered as the same surface.
What we need is a global SURFACES_BEING_RENDERED command, unless anyone can come up with a way of finding out the total number of surfaces in use?
If I have a single object, called BASE - it's loaded as a ANIMMESH and contains 20 child objects, each of which is centred on zero and is one of the objects I want to populate my level with. So, for example, BASE may contain 10 different trees, 2 benches, 4 cars etc...
Now, I store this BASE object and every time I want to create a single world object, I use COPYENTITY to duplicate the whole thing, then manually FREE every piece I don't want, leaving just a single child object behind.
Imagine that I do this for 100 trees (using the 10 different types within BASE) across a level at startup.
Would all the trees now be sharing one surface, despite being seperate entities with different shape meshes?
I've written a test program and this does work, but I have no way to quantify whether it's faster or slower than normal, or whether they are all being rendered as the same surface.
What we need is a global SURFACES_BEING_RENDERED command, unless anyone can come up with a way of finding out the total number of surfaces in use?