engine scale

Can you be a bit more specific? What kinds of effects are you looking for? Do you have any examples of games that do what you want?

like large models (shadow of the colosus) and many npc'son the screen at one time with little to nofreeze-up's(kingdom hearts and dynasty wariors)Preferably over 100.

You'll probably have better luck in the Graphics Programming and Theory forum, so I'm moving this over there for now.

Are you talking about large and precise scale numbers ala 12313982384.32187319283718923 or many objects on the screen, both are different problems.

For large models, you could apply a matrix scale operation on it. Model size is free, as long as the model remains identical in every other aspect.

As for many NPC's, you could do a few things to improve performance. You could use hardware/shader instancing for the models, so that the models wouldn't be copied from the cpu to the gpu over and over. You could also use multiple threads to perform AI operations, or batch their paths for path finding ( eg: Units move in groups, so only one calculation needs to be done for several NPCs rather than one for each ).

Make sure that you keep a low polygon/vertex count, and use Vertex buffers and index buffers to optimize performance.

Hope this helps.

Quote:

Original post by PSS Make sure that you keep a low polygon/vertex count

Nowadays polygon/vertex count is barely the problem, batches are. You can draw millions and millions of polygons at blazing speeds if it's all 1 batch. However - the more batches you send, the slow you'll get.

Quote:

Original post by agi_shi Quote: Original post by PSS Make sure that you keep a low polygon/vertex count Nowadays polygon/vertex count is barely the problem, batches are. You can draw millions and millions of polygons at blazing speeds if it's all 1 batch. However - the more batches you send, the slow you'll get.

This is true for newer cards, but you still want to be mindful of the effects of amateur models. A 10000 poly character model properly batched, could still have a significant effect on modern machines when hundreds of them are drawn.

But I agree that batching is a very important factor...obviously