Doesn't the entity.static flag stop an entity from having it's movement calculated etc.? If not, would it be possible to have a feature in the future which completely shuts the engine off to an entity except for rendering? Thanks!

You still have to check the entities flags each frame regardless of what they are. This is a time consuming task if you have 500 entities.

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If not, would it be possible to have a feature in the future which completely shuts the engine off to an entity except for rendering.

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Remove Object would be a good way.

The draw list / tree assigns what needs to be rendered / how and where, the render does not keep that data from frame to frame...

Ken

i think what he means is, there could be a flag that turns the model off for good.. so the engine wouldnt have to check it again, so its not an entity anymore but a like a piece of static geometry

Yep, that's what I meant. If the engine doesn't keep the values of every entities flags, actions ect. then I'm unsure if what I was thinking would be possible? Sorry if I'm wrong, I don't know much about the inner workings of graphic engines.

The influence of entities on the frame rate should be not too hard to understand:

If an entity is not invisible, it can increase the rendering time. If it is not passable, it can increase the collision detection and physics execution time for other moving entites. And if it has an action, it will increase the overall script execution time. You can see all this effects in the [F11] panel. Even an entity that is not rendered because it's hidden behind the camera or a wall, can have a small impact on the rendering time because it's bounding box is clipped against the frustrum.

JCL, although this sounds quite sensible... It can not excuse the framerate produced by many entities in A6 compared to other engines. Yes, once again someone comparing engines, even at the risk of becoming very unpopular in this place here! Let's have an example. The background-level for my current game project's main menu has got a lot of grass/vegetation models. These have the alpha-test material (->wiki) applied and all of them have actions running.
When opening up the control panel via [F11], it shows me:
Script exec time: ~1ms
Entity render time: ~25ms
Ref (I believe this one shows the calc time for the alpha-test): ~0.3ms

This is the scene, by the way (please ignore the water shader, as switching it off made a difference of about only 2-3 frames):

Here you can see that most of the calculation time is consumed by the entities themselves, not by the alpha-test material or the scripts. Nevertheless I tried to explore this further on. I rewrote my scripts, so that the models don't have any action at all now, the alpha-test material is still in but does nothing but alpha-testing (e.g. no dynamic deformation or sth. similar). So what I finally got is a level with nearly all actions removed, featuring about 500 entities with alpha test and small skins (64x64 and 128x128).
Except for the script exec time that changed to ~0.2ms, nothing happended and all those measures brought a plus of one single frame. There must be something wrong there! I'm using a Geforce 4 Ti 4200, which even does the job for, say, Farcry (if you reduce some details), where many many vegetation models are in the view. And I strongly believe this has to be an A6-issue as even making all the grass models use the same texture (mtlSkin1 instead of entSkin1 in the alpha-test effect) brought nothing but one more single frame.
Correct me if I'm seriously missing something here, but this sounds very strange to me.

I dont think that there is an problem with the entitys. i use more then 5000 at the same time without problems!!!

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Even an entity that is not rendered because it's hidden behind the camera or a wall, can have a small impact on the rendering time because it's bounding box is clipped against the frustrum.

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ahh this makes sense.. i didnt think about it.. thnx. So basically if you have a lot of ents, you should make them invisible if they are not on the screen?