Would really love instanced/batched skeletal mesh option as there already is for static meshes, I’ve tried rendering 100s of animated low poly models for a rts/total war type prototype but it’s just too slow, currently I have them as non-animated instanced static meshes to get the numbers I need for my scene.
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I support this.
stag beetle posted this in another thread. this is the closest ive seen but i cant build his project unfortunately. Ive also tried 100 low poly models for rts style game and its unbearable.
binary here
project :
Seconded.
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A few hundred skel mesh can be rendered fine. The expensive stuff is the character class and AI. But I would be happy with it too, but would require a different pathfinder.
Not if you would like your users to run your game in more then 20fps. Current skeletals are a waste of resources (when they are in hundreds on screen) no matter how you optimize them with available settings.
Sorry, I can manage 400 skeletal mesh based actors over 30 fps, 200 over 40 fps on my not extra laptop, doing pathfinding and collision. Nearly all stuff customized for RTS.
And you do realize that 30fps is by far not what you are looking for as performance, right? At least in serious development.
you really misunderstood me, I do not think it useless, the essence of what I said:
- not only skeletal mesh rendering causes the bad performance, thus instanced skel mesh rendering would be fine only for a “background” crowd e.g. in a stadium, if only a little variation is applied, but alone it is really not enough for a large scale RTS, because the main reason of performance drop is coming from behavior tree / pathfinding and avoidance / animation BP / movement and collision (physics), especially if you use Pawn or Character class (do you use that?).
- you can test it easily by putting numerous simple skel mesh actor in the level without collision (lower poly, simple 1 skin material, lower bone quantity are all performance winners), and compare to a level with similar number of characters with mesh replaced by a simple static mesh, and add them a simple behavior tree to do pathfinding, movement, and collect detailed performance cost information… so I do not think UE4 allows a large scale RTS to be implemented, especially multiplayer, even if this instancing stuff would be implemented.