Instance for frees?

Microneezia

Hello there,


I have little experience with game engines so I have to ask, does this rule of "free instanced geometry" once a piece is loaded - work in every game engine?

sprunghunt

Microneezia wrote: »

Hello there,


I have little experience with game engines so I have to ask, does this rule of "free instanced geometry" once a piece is loaded - work in every game engine?

It's never completely free. Too many objects can destroy some engines. But yes it always has for me. Otherwise it wouldn't be instanced.

renderhjs

it really depends on the engine. If a engine is optimized for it not only will the file loaded, parsed and initialized just once but also on the rendering part shared geometry if done right has to be looped just once for certain routines.
But like always it really really depends on the engine that processes it. I once heard that virtools has a very good support for instances that it really scales nicely if you use smartly instances.

Mark Dygert

Sometimes I think its more of a production saving measure, less unique assets to create, more time spent per asset or less hours worked. Or a space saving measure, one 512 for 10-15 objects vs 10-15 unique 512s. But depending on the engine it might not be exactly like loading 1 512 depending on how the objects are handled. I'm sure there are performance boosts but like everyone has said it really depends on the engine and the object. They all seem to have different rules and caps.

I think someone said once it helps keep load times lower... we had a thread on this subject before...

Eric Chadwick

Instancing saves a ton of memory no matter what engine, and depending on the engine can also reduce framerate like renderhjs points out.

Daaark

Vig wrote: »

Sometimes I think its more of a production saving measure

'Instancing' assets in a level editor, vs instanced rendering is 2 different things. Although, the assets in a level editor can be grouped for instanced rendering as well.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/rendering-grass-with-instancing-in-directx-10/
http://creators.xna.com/en-US/sample/meshinstancing