I have built a tank using the Chaos Wheeled Vehicle Movement Component and it works okay except for replicating more than a minute. It uses instanced materials where I rotate the texture along a track to give the illusion of treads moving under and around the wheels.
So I decided to roll my own and in the process I began exploring using instanced static meshes for the treads. It looks nice. But what I noticed is that with ten tanks on the map the frame rate drops into the basement.
I narrowed the performance killer to two parts: (1) the scripts used to calculate the position and orientation of each tread along the spline, and (2) the use of Batch Update Instances Transforms. The latter had a more significant impact.
I figure I can work on my scripts that do the frame by frame calculations and find ways to stream line the calculations. But I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on how to position a group of instanced static meshes in a more optimal way other than Batch Update Instances Transforms?