Performance and Static?

Hi everyone, I had a questions regarding scene objects.

I have about 2000 objects in a scene, all random variations of 10 different models (just larger or smaller, different rotations etc)

What would be the most efficient way to load them in the scene?

I've considered placing all 2000 under a single empty game object and made them all static (they wont be moving) - There is significant lag at startup
I've placed them each by loading them from prefabs then instantiating them where they belong (works well no lag) and I have not added "static" to the object properties.

Having so many variations of the same models, what way would you suggest I load them at the beginning of the scene?

 

Maybe put up a "now loading" gui texture, load up your objects, and get rid of the loading screen?

 

Well there is no loading screen at all, at the moment I just dropped all 2000 objects in the scene as static, I start the scene and there are some moments of lag.

However if I load and instantiate each object, it seems to run fine and the objects are not static.

Either way, instead of experimenting I was hoping I could get guidance on the best method to do so? any thoughts?

 

Don't instantiate all 2000 objects at a time then, from your findings, you've found that it causes lag. Do groups at a time or single ones at a time

 

Hmm, I think I may have a different problem. So... the scene starts with none of the 2000 objects in view, the player object is in view, then the camera turns towards the objects and when that happens there is this immediate lag for a moment.. maybe 30 seconds of lag happening. The objects are low poly but higher textures, I imagine I could benefit from LOD models etc.. but the lag completely disappears after that initial time..

 

Consider using DrawMeshInstanced instead of 2000 game objects.

 

Test this in a build on the target device, the editor and a final build might not have the same lag spikes. Unless it's game breaking and can't be somehow hidden (loading screen etc.) I would worry more about drawcalls and framerate than the initial lag for loading. If you go for individual non-static objects, make sure instancing works. This would be a good usecase for it.

 

Cool thanks, however I see this mentioned

"Note: You can only draw a maximum of 1023 instances at once." is that per mesh or total?

 

That limit is per call to the DrawMeshInstanced command. If you have more than that many, you will need to do more than one call of the command.

If you have 2000 objects in a scene and they are all random variations of 10 different models, you will need to call the DrawMeshInstanced command once per unique model anyway. (10 calls) If you have 200 instances of each unique model, you would call DrawMeshedInstanced 10 times and supply each call with the 200 instances. Each instance would have its own position, rotation, and size data.