Entity limit in DarkRadiant

[sparhawk]

I was just thinking about this, when I answered a question on TTLG. In the SDK we haev this limit of 4096 entities at the moment. It should be easy to make it bigger, because we can simply increase that number, and recompile the SDK. What happens with DR in that case? Does it also need to be recompiled, or does it handle entities more dynamically?

[greebo]

You can have as many entities as you want. They are created dynamically and aren't stored in a fixed size array like in Doom 3, so there's no limit as per code.

[sparhawk]

Ah, cool! So then changing that limit is quite easy if we need to.

[Springheel]

Just out of curiosity, why not just go ahead and increase the limit proactively?

[Baddcog]

Well Dromeders are used to a limit of 2400 objects. That includes Ai lights, of course it can easily be changed also, but there is a limit to 125 on screen objs that can't be changed.

 

In my largest maps I don't think I exceeded 4000. And Left 4 Dead was pretty big by Dromed standards.

[sparhawk]

I'm not sure wether it is a good idea to increase it without neccessity. It increases the memory consumption (maybe neglible in this case), and it also might decrease performance. There are some loops over this array, and it would have to be investigated what an impact it has to increase it.

[Springheel]

Ah, so just increasing the limit affects performance even if the mapper doesn't actually use that many? Makes sense to wait until it's needed then.

[sparhawk]

I'm not sure, but it could be. Depends on how many times these functions are called.