Hi to all!
A question that we have done in many, especially those that want to create outdoor games, where you need many entity like trees, houses, and many other objects, the problem is that how manage the number of entity that is visible and not visible, for maintain the number of framerate to a clean value, I have seen that there is some script that could be used, but they don't help much, I have played Gothic 2 and I have seen that when an object locates to a certain distance from the camera, it disappears! literally, from the sight and this, I creed that is a good function for maintain
the number of framerate, and thank to this function, that in Gothic is possible create many entity with many details, like for example a wall of stones that has built with many stones modeled singularly and then put together, creed that would be a very interesting thing if also in 3dgs could become the same thing.


salva

First of all, you have to differentiate between engine LOD and managed entities. The first thing is really easy: you setup LOD stages for you models and the engine switches between them (geometric detail) to save polygons and power for a deep view perspective. A6 supports 4 LOD levels (which is enough). So when you want to let your models disappear after the second LOD stage, just leave out 3rd and 4th LOD stage models. Engine LOD is always faster than LOD management you are doing by yourself. Though, its not that nice.. if a model turns into a zero-mesh, it is just clipped away (no fade or something similar).

Managed entities are totally different and can be easily combined with the LOD management. Imagine you have a wide outdoor level with a really high amount of entities. Trees, bushes, stones, rocks, whatever.. very repeatative stuff patterend all over the map. So, let us say you see 18 trees, 20 bushes, 20 rocks and 100 grass sprites _averagely_ all the time. You could save all positions, rotations, scales, etc. of all tree, rock, bush and grass entities all over the level. Then, during runtime, none of those entities are loaded.. only 18 tress, 20 bushes.. and so on. What you are doing: while wandering through the map your entity manager checks the camera position and view to check whcih virtual trees for instance are "viewable" but arent "there". So you take one tree out of your list, which isnt used or far away and move that tree to that position. The performance benefits from the constant entity rate and saved ent_create isntructions. This method in combination with LOD is it worth to check it out. I guess, that its only worth when having a WIDE landscape or whatever level populated with very similar objects.