How do games like "From the Depths" allow to ships to be built out of thousands blocks with no lag?

[xVergilx]

@kdgalla

Is that right? Even using Unity’s built-in Mesh.CombineMeshes script there is an option to merge all of the meshes that you combine into a single submesh. What I had in mind was combining meshes to a single submesh with a single material.

Right, there’s an option that’ve completely forgot.
Although, if the mesh is altered dynamically, I think .DrawMeshInstanced should win by a lot, because it will be a problem to manage all disconnected / reconnected “blocks”.

Creating / destroying meshes aren’t cheap as well.

Although, careful handling of both combining / GPU instancing might be a win / win situation.
Or memory allocs would destroy the performance. Never tried that.

[hippocoder]

@kennethcarrington2018

I think the reason that my game lags is due to way too many colliders.

It lags because of what the profiler says. You checked the profiler in hierarchy mode, sorting by time ms of course didn’t you?

@kennethcarrington2018

The blocks in from the depths are destructable. When hit by a projectile from any enemy ship they can break off of the ship they were attached to. With that said how would I combine meshes like what you said and still make them destructable?

You make the mesh out of chunks. Minecraft also uses this approach. It’s a common approach. Then when destruction occurs, you only need to rebuild part of the mesh, not all of it. Adding things like ECS/Burst/Jobs will make it trivial and cost pretty much nothing in performance.

@lordofduct

OP, this topic is MASSIVE. And any system you develop to do it is going to be something that spans more than just a simple script.

^
What he said.

[kdgalla]

@hippocoder

It lags because of what the profiler says. You checked the profiler in hierarchy mode, sorting by time ms of course didn’t you?

Oh yeah! In my initial reply, I forgot the most important thing of all- always check the profiler when your optimizing. Do that before anything else. Otherwise you may spend days fixing one thing, when the real problem might be something else.