making a track with a lot of objects... | Forums

[rlmergeuser]

so again i don't know if this was discussed here before...
i am not sure how things work in the editor, what i mean is:

i'm making a physics track in the sky, the driving line is almost finished (plat time is about 1 min or so), now i would like to decorate a lot in the background and of corse i wanna avoid lags and slowdowns.
what i wanna know is: how much can i decorate? is it very important to chose "decoration only" for all the objects in the background? where is the object limit? are there tricks to avoid lags with a lot of decoration?
thanks.

[rlmergeuser]

Note that the decoration thing only applies to objects within the physics bubble. Objects outside the physics bubble are never checked for physics regardless. Someone might will answer this better than me since I don't have experience with tracks with a ton of objects, but I've seen some tracks with a ridiculous amount of objects so I'm thinking you don't have anything to worry about unless you go really overboard with objects.

[rlmergeuser]

A couple of things I look at:

When selecting an object from the menus, there is a little "complexity" bar on the right of the screen that gives a rough idea of how expensive that object is to place. It's not clear precisely what the scale means, but at least it can be used to compare one object to another.

Another thing to look out for is how many objects can be visible at one time from a given camera angle. Sometimes lag can be fixed by slightly tweaking a camera to show less of the scene at a time.

I have a theory that using multiple instances of the same object is less expensive than using different objects of the same complexity. I'm actually working on a track now that has a huge number of objects, but they are constructed with many copies of a single object, and don't seem to have much of a negative impact.

You can always get a little better performance by lowering view distance and object distance. But I suggest that you start with these numbers maxed out. That way you can keep working until it starts to slow down, and you know you are reaching your limit. At that point, you still have an easy way to pick things back up without having to go back and delete some of your objects.

It's true that "decoration only" wont help lag if it's outside the physics bubbe, but it still sometimes helps to set it for further items if you start getting the message that the program is doing that for you automatically. Otherwise, it may turn an important obstacle into a ghost.

[rlmergeuser]

It would be nice to have an idea. I've thought of similar things.
But it would come down to placing 100's of objects in a row and running tests over and over again.
(no one wants to place 10000 planks to see if it slows down)
Everyone is busy on new ideas and no one has taken time yet to test this in a controlled fashion..

[rlmergeuser]

It shouldn't be that hard to place 10,000 planks (assuming the game can handle it).

Just place down 10, area select, and group them. Then select the group and duplicate it until you have 10 groups. Next, use a bigger area select to select those hundred, and group them. Repeat to get 1,000 then 10,000. I'm thinking you could do that all in about 5 minutes or less.

[rlmergeuser]

Yeah Skysaw I was thinking more of the testing... Lags at 10596 but not at 10595. And that would just be for planks.