After a tough couple days working on this I finally managed to get it working. The main reason for the set back is that I was trying to do too much too fast; never a good idea. I was trying to both integrate the instancing with the entity manager and other aspects of the code to ensure it performs with little interaction, whilst at the same time trying to increase the demo to support full matrices rather than just positions.
After a frustrating few hours debugging code I made a decision to step back a version and try to just implement the integration aspect and use only positions for the models.
Once I had made this decision the code simply fell into place, there was one small hiccup with the pass description but apart from that it all managed to go smoothly. Below is a video of the Instancing which now works using XML to specify which meshes will be instanced. This means that creating large scale environments with many simple models will be a breeze.
After a frustrating few hours debugging code I made a decision to step back a version and try to just implement the integration aspect and use only positions for the models.
Once I had made this decision the code simply fell into place, there was one small hiccup with the pass description but apart from that it all managed to go smoothly. Below is a video of the Instancing which now works using XML to specify which meshes will be instanced. This means that creating large scale environments with many simple models will be a breeze.
As always I'm still not happy with this outcome as there is much more needed to be done. Firstly there is the whole aspect of using the full matrices so that I can use rotation and scale on the models being instanced. This will be much easier now as I'm working with fully working code. There has been a massive performance drop from when I was doing the simple Instancing. This is due to the fact that because the Entity Manager is involved and these models are now entities in the scene the Entity Manager not only has 20,000 more models to iterate through but it also has that many entities to update. There are various ways I may go with this:
1. have a separate list for instanced entities that don't need updating or iterating through.
2. put up with it and accept that 20,000 models is a reasonable amount and still be able to have update functions for these instances.
I'm still undecided on which I will stick with, or I may even do both and use the appropriate one for the situation i.e. if there are lots of stationery objects such as plants, trees, shrubs then use the non-update version and then other for when entity interaction is necessary.
Anyway back to work :)
1. have a separate list for instanced entities that don't need updating or iterating through.
2. put up with it and accept that 20,000 models is a reasonable amount and still be able to have update functions for these instances.
I'm still undecided on which I will stick with, or I may even do both and use the appropriate one for the situation i.e. if there are lots of stationery objects such as plants, trees, shrubs then use the non-update version and then other for when entity interaction is necessary.
Anyway back to work :)
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