copy entity
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/copy entity
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| I am a bit dubious about the merits of using this. I thought that if you copied an object , there would be next to no overhead, but things soon slow down if you copy an object say 20 or 30 times. I thought the whole point of instances was that you could make huge scenes without fps slowdown. |
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| Reading previous threads - if you copy an object 20 times you get 20 x the surfaces and 20 x the polys. If you're copying a hi poly mesh with a few surfaces this may be the reason for the slowdown. |
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| Unless they have to all move independantly move the original entity to each new position and addmesh it to a single mesh that holds them all. |
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| I think the main merit was not having to load the same mesh a bunch of times, as well as keeping most of the entity settings |
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| CopyEntity doesn't duplicate triangles. The new entity is just another reference to the original mesh. Of course, when you render the 20 copies to the screen you are still drawing 20 of *something*. |
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| One big merit is that you save the oh so precious memory by not loading the mesh multiple times as floyd said. |
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| so in fact I may as well just copy it in max and export it as normal. So whats the difference between blitz 'copy entity' and say the instances used in UT2003? To be fair blitz handles larger poly counts quite well, but I will have to use some kind of occlusion to really get those higher poly counts. This is all theoretical of course, because I'm not going above 15,000 polys for my demo. its jsut nice to know the limitations. |
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