I have several models I made using AC3D software. The models seemed to work just fine but schemes I made in the editor ran slow (We all seem to have that problem). I just thought it was a reload problem.

I ran a test using a empty, flat world and looking at the horizon I got 240fps.

I then put in the mix 1 of my models (Tower) the frame count went down to 50 fps.

Replaced the tower with a combat building and the count went up to 239 fps.

I went back to my model software and looked at the object info and found the tower model had a total of 173 objects, 1398 surfaces and 1740 vertices.

I discovered that there was a command available in AC3D to merge the image components before exporting the file as an x file (tower.x). After the merge the file went to 2 objects (no longer 173)



Went back to my flat world and put in my new merged tower file and the fps went from the original 50 fps (mentioned above) to 236 fps !!!



The file (tower.x) size remained the same (607 kb) but the fps increase was 4.5 times.



Just a heads up for those making their own models. I'm no expert when it comes to making models and maybe everyone knows about merging model components but I found it interesting.

Reckon the engine was trying to calculate collision for all those separate parts instead of a single collision envelope, it would probably treat each part differently for culling and draw calls as well leading to more unnecessary calculations



It's all probably a side effect of the introduction of LOD where the engine reads separate meshes in the .x file instead of treating it as a single model. All the same I am in the habit of attaching everything before export so wouldn't really notice.



Still, nice catch and makes me wonder how the construction kit will treat all these separate meshes used to create prefabs in future. I believe it is intended to have these collapse to single mesh.



You should have posted this in 3rd party models and media where all the modelers hang out

rolfy,



Thanks for the possible explanation of what is going on.

Makes sense to me.



Some time, if you have time could you let me know what software you use to create models.



Don't know who is developing the construction kit, I would hope they have checked out the potential problem.



Again, thanks for the response.

The plan is that the Construction Kit will bake the buildings into a few island meshes with texture atlasing to reduce draw calls and a oriented box based collision map for the physics. In theory it means they will be every bit as optimum as the artist derived assets we currently have. There will not be LOD for the first version but it's an improvement we can make over time once the important aspects of the CONKIT are solved such as UI and overall speed of the resulting constructs.