Hmmm I was affraid of that. They have to be seperate entities since the player can interact with any single one at a time and I really don't want to write my own code to tear apart a giant mesh to find the box that they're trying to interact with etc.
How Fast is addmesh? might it be faster to hide all entitys, and add each one to a single mesh (and how would I go about that preserving position, alpha, scale etc) then it just has to send that 1 mesh since everything else is hidden. then wipe the mesh, update my entitys, and repeat... I'm assuming that's a stupid idea, but if add mesh is fast and sending that many entitys is slow (obivously is) then is that worth looking into?
Something that just poped into my head is handling the EntityInView my self and then grouping entitys into blocks of 4 or so and just testing for visiblity on that. that would cut out 75% of the testing time and since many would be turned off it should in theory limit the number being sent to the card... that is assuming that a hidden entity isn't sent at all...
How Fast is addmesh? might it be faster to hide all entitys, and add each one to a single mesh (and how would I go about that preserving position, alpha, scale etc) then it just has to send that 1 mesh since everything else is hidden. then wipe the mesh, update my entitys, and repeat... I'm assuming that's a stupid idea, but if add mesh is fast and sending that many entitys is slow (obivously is) then is that worth looking into?
Something that just poped into my head is handling the EntityInView my self and then grouping entitys into blocks of 4 or so and just testing for visiblity on that. that would cut out 75% of the testing time and since many would be turned off it should in theory limit the number being sent to the card... that is assuming that a hidden entity isn't sent at all...