I have to disagree...instancing is absolutely necessary when rendering things like grass in particular...unless you use batched sprites, if you use models you must use instancing.

As it stands there is no way currently to render large amounts of grass (and other similar things) efficiently in A8. I implemented my own instancing functions in a dll to do this, but it would better all around if it were in the engine.

I think a lot of users would appreciate this feature.

SPRITE INSTANCING is already supported. you can render very large areas of grass with that. Using models for grass is waste of resources even with instancing.

But what if you want to render hundreds of little rocks and stones on the ground? Or what if there is a city view with hundreds of lowpoly houses in the background? A forest also consists of not only unique trees. You could repeat a handful of trees all over the scenery. Although a forest could use sprites in a distance as some kind of impostors (static or dynamic).

I would certainly love to have instancing, of course I would love to have A8 as well

Good to see people who know how important instancing is.
just one example. I'm developing an 3d city building game with 3dgs. Many times the same building, same streetmodels, same trees same people and so on are placed.
For me instancing would make the fps in my game higher.
And I think also other games would be faster with instancing.
In other engines instancing is working so good, so I think they should do model-instancing for A8.

Just my two cents to this...
There is no need for a lot of different models for vegetation. You get a bunch of variation by using different rotation, size, color and animation state - probably even changing the geometry on the graphic card itself. All these things can work with just one model. And some tropical-shooter-thingy-game proofed that it works pretty well. Didn't they use just 7 or 8 different models?

Personally I need no instancing in my projects, but if someone knows, how it's properly used, there can be huge speed advantages.

@ Benni:
For the city thing you could use wmbs with lod while the first lod of the wmb gets all buildings seperately and the last lod 'collects' them in a single model.

from the V8.00.1b beta - released Apr 23, 2010


There could be better solutions, maybe.

@ Scorpion
JCL, himself, didn't recommend to use animated models for that, because animated models are always slower than non-animated models...

The point is... we should not need workarounds for such things.
I don't know how isntancing works and what the frame rate is, so I cannot evaluate jcl's or other statements here.

In general the engine has all the important stuff implemented, but in a waste amount of cases, they are hard to use and set up to work just right. In my opinion that is the thing where more focus has to go. Maybe even some wrappers/simple dlls for the editors could make our lives a waaaay easier.

@Pappenheimer
Do the animations procedurally on the gpu and you're fine with that