I started noticing this a while back but have been to busy to make any real note of it until now.
It's making it quite difficult to place grass in the editor, that even when you're far enough away from any grass you still get massive massive slowdown if there happens to be any in the area.
Even if you turn off grass in the editor, if you face (say) an open prairie where there have been placed lots of grass your framerate will drop down into the single digits easily. One can verify through wireframe that they aren't actually being rendered, but still causing a massive amount of cpu over head unless you actually remove the grass. Why is this and how do I avoid it without simply doing without grass?
As I've seen whats possible with clever instancing even in a "crappy" (to be fair: just alittle bit dated) engine like Unity, I have to say placing grass, or even trees as objects is not optimal...
@EthanC I'm thinking possibly that a way to get around that "each individual grass will count as an object" thing is to group together clumps of ground level plants beforehand, in Maya or 3dStudio for example, and then import it all into Esenthel as a single "object". Also the LOD thing, blah blah blah...
We having the same problem. My PC spec are decent enough but the FPS are extremely low. We are getting like 2-5 fps which is extremely slow but yet we have relatively low vegetation objects (i.e. grass and trees) and we checked the vegetation has low poly.
Just for your information only (Since no one even bothered to reply). I think we solved a bit of the performance issue. Earlier on, we forgotten about LOD and distancing. After making all the necessary LOD and distancing for the vegetation model, it does help improve the overall FPS. We gained around 4x the performance, which improve the avg of 15fps to about 40fps. We are still looking for method that could help us improve the FPS more.
