Blueapples' Blog

The interior lighting and design looks great!

 

If it becomes prohibitive, keep a pooling system and only unload mesh and material objects that you don't need to reuse. Of course, then you would need to implement your own map loading logic and only have one map since the map file isn't documented. That kind of seems like a lot of work. I think a streaming system would be beneficial here so that you could load stuff as you get close.

You will want to keep 1 instance of all the textures/models you will ever use. Otherwise you'll run into pauses while loading.

You will want to keep 1 instance of all the textures/models you will ever use. Otherwise you'll run into pauses while loading.

If your maps share a lot of resources then I would recommend creating a new world, loading a map, and then clearing the old world, as this will avoid reloading of any files that appear in both maps, since they won't get deleted.

You've just gave me an idea.

After Josh's suggestion, I am currently using a stack structure in Lua to keep track of "outer" worlds, which I then pop off and reactivate to exit an area. I think what I might do to keep video memory use constant and reduce interior load times is to place a bunch of the interior assets in an off-map area of the main map, so their resources are loaded on startup and then stay in memory. I'm okay with loading a few assets when moving into interiors if they are unique to that "tree" of maps, if that makes sense, since they will only be loaded/unloaded the first time you enter each area.

 

The biggest issue I'm running into now is that with exterior and interior assets I'm already pushing 950MB of video memory. Definitely going to need an extreme optimization pass. Or more like passes.