Scenes and stuff

[Recksinn]

Hello everybody i recently purchased this software as an upgrade from the blender game engine and a cheaper alternative as compared to other larger software out there.I plan on making a huge open world and I was wondering to optimize as much as I can.Is it possible to have more than 1 scene in a project.Basically I want these scenes as different cells.So everything doesnt load at 1 go and that it would make the game run smoother.Other questions I have,can i make my own custom splash screen a few images that appear before the main menu,(Mentioning the programs i used and such)as well is it also possible to make a main menu as well as a GUI ?

[Rick]

You can have more than 1 map by doing File->New. Then you can load these maps at any time. Loading a map though will cause a pause as it's reading from disk and any read from disk will cause a pause.

 

I plan on making a huge open world and I was wondering to optimize as much as I can

 

LE really doesn't handle this all that well honestly (depending on what you mean by huge). Josh tends to steer people away from the idea of huge open worlds saying it's not realistic for 1 person/small team to do (possibly some truth in that). You can do this but it more requires you to code a system to handle such a thing.

 

 

The various ways I can think of doing this would be:

 

1) Just try and brute force it. Make the largest terrain and just populate everything in 1 map. You might run into performance issues with this method but in terms of effort on your part it's the easiest but of course if you can't get the performance for the user then it's worthless.

 

2) You can't use Map:Load() on another thread as it loads entities into the world and that all has to happen on the same thread LE runs on. I haven't heard anyone do this successfully. So instead if you store entity information yourself instead of using LE's map system then you may be able to load that information on another thread and pass it to the main thread to load the actual models. LE uses an instancing system so loading a model/texture that's already loaded just makes another instance and is basically instant and won't cause a pause in the game. This would obviously take more effort on your behave.

 

3) You could use networking on the same machine (some games do this). Basically when your game starts it starts a "server" application as well that basically stays hidden. This "server" app is sort of acting like another thread where it reads information about the map and then sends network messages to your main game to act on. This would require a different map storage than just the plain LE map format (I guess you could use the LE map itself if you knew how to read it (it's binary)). This would obviously take more effort on your behave.

 

I really do wish LE used something like a SQLITE DB to store it's map information. Having it in text format and able to run sql on it would be handy in various ways.

 

All of this depends on how many entities you really plan on having. If the current veg system works for you (ie you don't need to chop trees down or anything like that) and you plan on having lower entity count "areas" (not many massive towns) then #1 should be OK, but like you said it may have a higher 1 time loading time.

 

The thing to remember is that LE won't load an asset in another thread so in the other systems you'd still have to load 1 of each unique model/texture at the start to precache it anyway. If you load a new model/texture during run-time there will be a pause in the game.