Objects Vs Wall Memory usage

[MaxVK]

Hi, just a quickie:

Do walls with texture use as much memory as an object?

Example:

I have a house that I built in Sketchup. It works fine, imports fine and looks okay (as long as you go past at a sensible rate).

Rather than place twenty such objects in a row, would it be better memory wise, to place two, one at the start and one at the end of the row, and then join them together with a wall, sized in width and height to match the houses, and using a texture made up of the house texture?

The house is essentially just a box and a wall can mimic that easily. The house object on either end of the wall effectively caps the wall.

Is a wall better in this instance?

cheers

MVK

 

[Alex Ramsey]

I don't believe it would make a huge difference but it probably comes down to whichever one has the least waypoints and that I would not know.

 

[gegewrc]

It would be indeed very interesting to know what use the most the memory and what create the low FPS level.

 

[MaxVK]

Thanks for replying.

Id imagine that the wall would take less memory. Many of the games make extensive use of tree walls, so I assume they are optimized in some way, so it would probably be down to the texture, but Id like to know this for sure.

 

[Biggles1212]

I made a sobject that was a bunch of houses like the industrial housing in England, works quite well actually, and because you can mix and match textures, you can get a whole bunch of houses on a few textures. It's effectively a shaped wall then, but it works fine.

 

[MaxVK]

I thought SObjects took more memory/processing than a normal wall, and besides, I'm very early in my XPack creation, and SObjects are not yet on the menu!

 

[Kris Vickers]

I thought SObjects took more memory/processing than a normal wall, and besides, I'm very early in my XPack creation, and SObjects are not yet on the menu!

They`re quite easy to do after a little playing around and trail & error with your objects.

Dont be afraid to try it

 

[MaxVK]

I have no doubt that I will, but the question remains, although now with another caveat to consider:

What uses the most memory: Walls, Objects of SObjects?

 

[MaxVK]

Anyone?

 

[mianiak]

Once in the game and running, there is no difference between an SObject and a Wall, the game simply sees it as an object. What is considered is the amount of polygons used.

If you make a 10m long wall with a panel spacing of 5m (without capping it) you will have 12 polygons. The wall will have 2 panels, each panel will be 5m long, each panel has 3 faces with 2 poly's on each face.

If you make an SObject exactly the same as that wall ^^, it will also have 12 polygons, the game will not treat either differently and will treat them exactly the same.

The same goes for an Object, but with an Object you have the length of it to consider. For example, you have a 10km long track and you need a guard rail all the way along it. If you made a 10km long Object for the guard rail you will have problems because it has to load the whole Object into memory and keep it there. That's why you would use walls or SObjects to break it down into smaller sections, so then it would only need to load the closer objects and it can leave the distant objects out until you get closer to them.
Also a tip I have figured out for walls, you can make one long wall and use the cross section tool to split it up into smaller sections.

There are other things to consider like shadow's, textures, collision, material, etc, etc. But if you look at it as both being the same, then there is no difference.

There is one more bit of info I can give you which is, the amount of polygons that can be used. The game can handle quite a lot of polygons, if you look at some tracks with the amount of trees, grass, walls, people, buildings, etc etc, then you can see quite easily how many polygons it can take. Unless you are running the game on a P3 800mhz there is no real limit to what you can do. Consider the 16 other cars on the track with you, they all have around 11,000 polygons each, I don't think a few extra polys on a wall will make a difference.

What does matter and what does take up memory, is the textures.

 

[MaxVK]

Thanks mianiak, that sort of clears things up a bit (Although I mainly drive RBR, so there are no cars on the track with me!).

Unless you are running the game on a P3 800mhz there is no real limit to what you can do.

Well I'm sure not using one of those! However, Id imagine that there is going to be an upper limit based on your current system configuration. I know if I put 10,000 complex trees in a smallish area the game will stagger when it gets there.

But its good to know that the textures are the issue. My current track is pretty long with a lot of scenery around it, but the objects are fairly simple trees, and while they are all along the track, they are spread out a fair bit.

Thanks. Its all good to know.

MVK