Especially when you’re viewing them from several kilometers above.

Here’s the first screenshot of MMORPG Tycoon 2 running with mesh instancing support for trees (as well as buildings, although not many buildings are visible here).  In this screenshot, 488 trees are visible (my debugging information tells me;  I didn’t actually count them).  As noted yesterday, there’s no visible difference to frame rate, even in this unoptimised debug build, which is awesome news, as far as I’m concerned!  I’m particularly pleased to have it successfully hooked into the game’s culling system, so even though we can easily afford to draw about 500 trees, we still only bother to actually draw the ones which might be visible to the player.

There are a few architectural issues I need to fix up, still;  in this build, it actually draws all the trees multiple times, if you’ve activated more than one region.  Which obviously isn’t really what we want;  just drawing them once would be ideal.

Tomorrow, I’ll be fixing that bug, and will then get subscribers and monsters converted over to use instanced rendering as well.  I’ve also noticed a bug in the positioning of text inside pop-up tooltips (not visible in this screenshot);  that’s probably come from my refactoring of how VectorStorm handles positioning of models and sprites.  My goal for tomorrow is to have a screenshot showing a full map with at least 10,000 trees in it.  :)

Once all of that is working, I’ll release this as a new RenderTech build (hopefully before the end of the week), and then it’ll be time to get back to working on gameplay mechanics:  quest editing for MS5!