(02-18-2013 09:35 PM)Tottel Wrote: Fex: For armor pieces, 2.0 seems to have a better system in place. I haven't used it myself, but I can see how it's a lot better than using parts.
Anyway, I'm just using the parts (hiding/showing) to build (animated once placed) a turret piece by piece. I'll see if I can use something else in the meantime, thanks Esenthel.
Actually I have done it both ways in EE 1.0:
(1)Show/hide meshparts of one giant mesh file with all armors attached, then just hide the armor meshparts that are not being equipped.
or
(2)Separate mesh files for each piece of armor, mounted on the same skeleton (like in the armor tutorial)
So far I have settled on using (1) because my understanding is that it:
A. Results in less Draw calls on the GFX card (meshparts get merged into a single mesh for drawing right? (Esenthel's reply above makes me doubt this...) Whereas (2) will need a draw call for each armor mesh piece (helmet, pants boots etc)).
B. Forces all the mesh textures to be loaded into RAM at startup, so that there is no load lag freeze when a player "pops" on screen that is wearing an armor that has not been displayed before. (I guess this could be achieved in method (2) by creating one instance of every armor mesh to force the data into the mesh/material cache, then just not draw them.)
I should download the demo of EE 2.0 and test the performance, if EE 2.0 has better performance using either (1) or (2) over EE 1.0 its worth it to me to make the leap into the future...