Hi again,
I downloaded and started to "playing" with Esenthel today and when I was doing a little research I found many posts about performance issues in this engine. No occlusion culling etc. It scared me a bit because I really enjoy graphic quality here. I was planning to make little rpg-online with isometric perspective(diablo like) so I don't need to display whole(really bid at once) location and all objects but only in screen range. Is there any optimization for this kind of game/view? In my case I think I won't need occlusion but it's rather bad it's not here.. When I want to display like 20 players(different outfits) at once with different animations + lights this engine would work?
Probably only Esenthel's enthusiastics will answer me so I guess u're going tell me thats it's okay so can u guys just tell me where these posts came from?

Of course performance will always be an issue. These posts came from some people who were pushing things to the limits, or did not have enough experience in level-design and/or environmental analysis [oh yeah, this hill looks really nice here, let's place it here without thinking because it looks cool].

Before we start a discussion here... again... just try it out for yourself, because you made up your mind already to do so, and words of us "enthusiastics" will never overrule own experiences

Hi there,

Logically, the engine does have frustrum culling, which brings huge performance benefits to top-down games, like the one that you have in mind.
Will 10 characters and a bunch of lights be a problem? Not at all. But as Dwight said, you will need to optimize your assets and think about your levels to gain the best possible performance.

http://www.esenthel.com/community/showth...144&page=4 Check out Pixel's game to get an idea of performance. I'd expect at some point, Esenthel will finally get cracking on some of the performance techniques, but the engine really is capable without them.

I have run many more animated characters (mixture of models) with lighting and fairly high poly density environments in much larger areas than you are anticipating if you're planning on using isometric views, so I wouldn't envisage any problem with what you are proposing. Frustum culling will provide good rejection of geometry under these circumstances. Multiple LODing levels would be less critical in Isometric view I'd have thought but you still need to apply lighting sensibly and optimise where you can (only enable it when it's going to be seen etc)

Where Esenthel currently struggles is with dense vegetation visible over long distances where both occlusion culling and hardware instancing would help. But even with these you can still push the limits of any engine.

I've settled for what I believe are reasonable compromises on view distances in order to maintain a fairly high level of detail and complexity with an acceptable frame rate, but then my game is not using an isometric view.

Just as a side note, don't confuse enthusiasts with people who are deliberately going to mislead you in some way. There is nothing to gain from doing so, in fact it would be counter productive to this community and engine!

Thanks for many answers I'm going to step deeper in this engine and see what can be done. I want to make small isometric mmorpg just for myself but I work as a programmer so it's not easy to make myself to write extra code after work :0 I ask cuz I don't want to make mistake on start and waste my time. I was thinking about Unity but as far as I know it has poor network support and all plugins, starting packages are rly expensive..

I sympathize with you as I too am a full time programmer by day, but Esenthel has a way of making you put those extra hours in as it just does what it says on the box. It's a great engine to work with.

I wish you luck!