Performance and Other Technical Jargon (Patreon)

TL;DR: The game will run much smoother because the current tree model was never meant to last so long.

I've relearning a lot of stuff about how Unreal Engine 4 handles meshes and draw calls, and determined that trees are one of the least efficient models in the game. This on it's own wouldn't normally be a problem, but they are also the model which appears most often in the game!

I really should have figured this out earlier, but it's causing a lot of the performance issues plaguing the game at this point. The first step I've taken is adding a second LOD mesh. This means that once a mesh is a certain distance from the camera a new mesh will be swapped out.

It's impossible to count the number of trees the game is trying to call at once, especially because of mesh culling. But in situations when the game tries to draw far more trees (for example, looking across the map from the Lord's Manor) significant performance hits are taken. If you look at the poly counts above, even someone with no game development experience can see why this would be a problem. In certain situations trees are accounting for billions of polys. This is not okay.

The original placeholder model for trees will also be optimized very soon, since I'm still not happy with even close up trees costing 2k polys.

EDIT: Added a third LOD mesh. This mesh is literally a cross plane with a picture on it, like N64 foliage xD