CompuServe Messages

M.G. Hmm, I think you missed my point about the 3DStudio imposed limit of 65k faces per object. Each instance of an AXP'd object is treated as one object, even though one Flock3D might be drawing more than one "bird". If you have a 1000 face source object, it doesn't matter if you ask for 65 birds, or 500. 3DStudio will only allow 65, so Flock3D cuts the number to 65. This is treated by Studio as one 65k face object at render time. About the large memory usage: This is because you're creating such a large scene. It doesn't really matter if you have 3 flocks at 65k faces each, or if you have 220,000 static faces in the scene, that's a very large scene for Studio and you're going to need a ton of memory. As a test I saved the chevy.3ds that comes with Studio as an .asc file, (big bad .asc file!) and used it as a source object. Since the chevy contains more than 32k faces, the maximum number of chevys is one! (fyi) pages 114-115 in the Installation Guide show the memory usage for vertices/faces/etc. I've talked to a number of people who were surprised that a scene containing a couple of boxes hosting AXPs could bog their 486/586 down. Most of them had never worked with 150k, 200k+ scenes. There's always some wild talk about >>improperly designed ipas routines, so please let me explain Flock3D's memory requirements: Lets use 65 1000k face&vertex as our example settings. 1) We use two SDK data structures called VData and FData, for vertex and face data information. This requires us to malloc a structure for each face and vertex at render time. So 2*65k*sizeof(data structures) – not too bad. This is required by all axps who wish to use burst mode. 2) We additionally malloc two (somewhat) similar data structures called SVData and SFData for the faces and vertices contained in the source object. 2*1000k*sizeof(data structures) – this is the "extra" memory we use to let you pick the shape of the birds. What about non-burst mode? This would indeed allow us to save memory usage from #1, but would also run 30-40 times slower. It would also NOT affect the memory requirements of Studio. (what you're seeing) What about the new SDK3 for ipas programming? I think the improvements and new features WILL allow us to save memory from #1, like non-burst mode would, and should let us go even faster! (tempting peek: .asc files should go away!) Clear as mud? 🙂 Don Hanson