Zones and portals

[Josh]

From what I have seen, I think you guys are going to degrade your performance by trying to hack on an extra culling system.

[Rick]

We are playing around with the view range and that might be the ticket, but we plan on having a fairly large town (we have some ways to repeat some geometry but still make it seem unique). So having all the thousands of entities that the interiors require to be loaded at once will be a test that we try to see how much memory is taken up and how the editor responds. This is a constant learning process on tweaking things to meet our game requirements. We are getting there.

[shadmar]

This works pretty well, just need one parse in the start() (saves you from setting viewrange manually)

 

    --optimize scene place objects in viewrange based on their aabb radius.

for i=0,world:CountEntities()-1 do

if world:GetEntity(i):GetClass()==Object.ModelClass then

local aabb=world:GetEntity(i):GetAABB(Entity.GlobalAABB)

if aabb and aabb.radius < .1 then world:GetEntity(i):SetViewRange(0)

elseif aabb and aabb.radius < 1 then world:GetEntity(i):SetViewRange(1)

elseif aabb and aabb.radius < 10 then world:GetEntity(i):SetViewRange(2)

elseif aabb and aabb.radius < 20 then world:GetEntity(i):SetViewRange(3)

else world:GetEntity(i):SetViewRange(4) end

end

end

[Rick]

As we're finding out with this much detail we need to set the view range in the editor or the editor gives us issues and crashes. I assume setting in code at run-time doesn't hold over to design time.

[shadmar]

That was just for runtime.

[Rick]

I see. The thing is we have to set the models view range manually when we place them (have to check if that field holds through prefabs) or else the editor will choke out and crash given the number of things we have when we are designing our town. Design time is more of an issue for us than run-time at this point since we are pointing the camera all over the place to move around freely. Since our camera is a top/down camera at run-time there isn't much visible by the camera, at one time anyway, and the FPS is fairly good when this is the case.

 

The dynamic loading/unloading process at run-time we do is more about memory/entity count management than anything else.

[YouGroove]

The thing is we have to set the models view range manually when we place them (have to check if that field holds through prefabs) or else the editor will choke out and crash given the number of things we have when we are designing our town

 

This could be an interesting suggestion topic : Optionnal View range field in model properties on the editor

 

 

--optimize scene place objects in viewrange based on their aabb radius.

for i=0,world:CountEntities()-1 do

if world:GetEntity(i):GetClass()==Object.ModelClass then

local aabb=world:GetEntity(i):GetAABB(Entity.GlobalAABB)

if aabb and aabb.radius < .1 then world:GetEntity(i):SetViewRange(0)

elseif aabb and aabb.radius < 1 then world:GetEntity(i):SetViewRange(1)

elseif aabb and aabb.radius < 10 then world:GetEntity(i):SetViewRange(2)

elseif aabb and aabb.radius < 20 then world:GetEntity(i):SetViewRange(3)

else world:GetEntity(i):SetViewRange(4) end

end

end

 

Thanks for the tip.