Culling of Objects not in POV

[Argh]

I'd like a feature, for Features and Units, where if they have the tag "cullifNoPOV=1;", they are only drawn if in the camera's view for a certain number of frames, based on a check every few frames.

Otherwise, they're culled from rendering each pass. Should really boost performance for Features especially.

Personally, I think it might work well to update based on the camera POV maybe once every SlowUpdate- not every frame, to save calculations.

Just have stuff do an alpha fade in over a 10-frame period, or whatever, so that pop-in will happen, but be visually graceful. Better than forcing it per-frame, imo, and far cheaper- stuff with this tag won't be drawn at all, if the user is zooming their camera around the map all the time, but will be drawn if they come to a halt for a half-second or so, and won't just pop into existence.

[lurker]

Argh, I just tested to make sure, and everything, features included, seems to be getting culled properly for me. Do you have shadows on? Because iirc that has problems with not culling, but I can't test it because I don't have a capable card.

[Argh]

Hmm. Then the hit with Features is that they're getting drawn at all view-distances, then. Maybe an IconType-like tag for them, so that they can be culled at a distance from the camera? I'd like to give mappers the ability to spam massive numbers of Features with WorldBuilder, but I'm rather frightened of the probable consequences if I let them do so.

Features and their total drain re: pathfinder + polycount are a surprisingly large amount of total load, when I've run big games of P.U.R.E.- the fields of Corpses drag performance down by quite a lot eventually.

I'll look at other approaches- maybe spamming a single Feature with a Footprint of 8,8, then sub-spamming other Features within that grid with no Footprint and blocking = 0 will be a sufficiently-efficient way to go about this...