Game Development Community

DTS Collision, Reasource Hog?

by Greg Gardinier · in Torque Game Engine · 07/29/2005 (4:46 am) · 5 replies

I am planning on creating a large cave using a dts object with ALLOT of collision objects. It will use upwards of 30 or possible 50 individual cubes for the collision meshes.

Is this wise?

The actual amount of geometry will not be that high but there will be many individual meshes. I have already modified the engine code to support the number of collision objects I need and have created a test mesh with about 12 collision meshes on it and it doesn't seam to hit my frame rate hard, but I wanted to make sure.

So, will ALLOT of collision meshes hurt my frame rate, or possibly lead to other problems?

Thanks
NextNext Thread
PrevPrevious Thread
More from Torque Game Engine


Associate Kyle Carter
#1
07/29/2005 (5:58 am)
I'm sure you can bog down the system if you've got enough; where that threshold is exactly I couldn't say. I would suggest just placing as many as you want and seeing what hapens. You might want to try using the profiler (profilerEnable(1); profilerDump(); and ENABLE_PROFILER preprocessor define) to see where your time is going, too.

Torque Owner Greg Gardinier
#2
08/29/2005 (2:09 pm)
Thanks allot for the reply Ben. I used that "Profiler" command you talked about above and was able to get it to dump all it's info into the console.

Problem is I am not a programmer. So I don't know quite what to make of this.

There are four collums:

%NSTime

%Time

Invoke

Name

Then there is a very long list of all the proscess running with in the engine along with thier corisponding corisponding numbers.

For example:

%NSTime    % Time    Invoke  #    Name
2.763      20.656     17172       ClientProcess

What numbers should I be looking at here, and what do they mean?


Thanks

Torque Owner Mark Storer
#3
08/29/2005 (5:26 pm)
@Greg: I don't believe the collision meshes will change your frame rate at all until it's time to test for collisions. If your player is walking around on the cave floor without any performance issues (in other words: is in contact with the cave floor/wall/whatever), then you should be fine.

Should be. ;)

Torque Owner Greg Gardinier
#4
08/29/2005 (7:03 pm)
Yeah, I figued as much. However, I am still interested in the Profiler command for use with other things. It seams like it would be a great tool for optimizing. If somone could tell me what that actual catorgories mean that would be great :)

Thanks for the responce

Associate Kyle Carter
#5
08/29/2005 (7:36 pm)
NSTime = non sub time, the time taken exclusively by code in the named block but not by any of its children.
Time = time, time taken by this block and all its children.
Invoke # = number of times this blobk was executed.
Name = name of the block.

Percents are of time the profiler was active, or in general, of frame time (ie, the time spent rendering a frame).

Blocks of code are defined by PROFILE_START and PROFILE_END blocks.