Hey, I need a very fast way to change the meshes of entities.
I know I can use ent_setmesh(), but I need to do it in a much more faster way. I just need to set the mesh. No collision update etc. needed. Is there a possibility to set the meshpointer of an entity directly, without ent_setmesh?
I need to set a new mesh on ca.2500 Entities (300poly) every frame. I tried it also with ent_morph, thats fast enough without collision, but the different models need too much space...

maybe using vertex animated models?

I already tried this, have you ever tried to run vertex animation on even 500 cloned entities? The framerate breaks down. I think I have to do it in the way I wrote, but how to get and set the mesh?...

yes, tried
cloning is usually a bad thing on memory usage...
depending on the quantity of "frames" you could use multiple entities for each object, and setting/resetting their INVISIBLE flag frame by frame must be fast, and no need for ent_clone.

hm multiple entities...
then I would need 300 entities for every Figure... because there will be this much of different needed meshes.

what the hell are you doing?

Indeed, it sounds like you are running into a XY problem there.
What are you actually trying to do?

Hi, actually I'm trying to make a different animation system for my game ^^
If I use vertex or bones animation it's too slow. 1000 Figures should be animated (lowpoly) without crashing the framerate. The animations don't have to be very soft. 15-20 steps per second are enough. I was able to "animate" them with ent_morph with 60 frames per second and 3000 Characters. But all the different models need too much space. Means for one Charakter with one Animation scene I need 15-20 Models.

So you want to replace some thousand meshes manually at runtime and hope that this will yield a faster animation system than the built-in vertex/ bones system? Why don't you just use for example the bone animation via vertex shader? My next game will be an RTS (I assume you are working on one, too), I've already tested it and it works amazingly fast.

hm do you mean the matBones shader? I'm using this shader for the animation. 400 Entities are no problem, but more are breaking the frame rate. And these are just the figures... with calling ent_morph on 3000 different entities every frame, the framerate was on 60 per second! And yes, maybe I will work on a RTS, otherwise on Simulation game... but I know that I will need many figures moving around.