Quote: "There was a newsletter a while back which talked about a new FPSC technology where static entities could be introduced with no collision so we could have things like grass and shrubs without a huge performance hit but never heard anymore about it"
Unfortunately as far as I know we have no auto or easy means of populating a scene with large numbers of grasses, trees, etc as yet.
Still if you want to do this manualy you can and possibly use Load and Unload entities to help reduce impact on fps. Not sure how well it would work or if at all.
Regardless of that a large number of trees for instance in the case of a forest in an outdoor level say should be possible in FPSC without a serious hit on fps.
The use of such comes back to the same issue of Character drain on fps as no matter how well FPSC can handle large numbers of other kinds of entities once one introduces Characters the fps will drop off quickly and in such instance the more non character entities you have in a level the greater the impact will be will be on engine performance once Characters start being introduced - pro rata.
i.e. the more Characters you want the less of everything else you can have.
Perhaps the migration version will improve the situation in some or all of these areas but we wont know until it becomes a reality.
See the attached screen shot of my Ally test level to which I have added some extra grass and a few more trees. This uses the latest Beta. There are six enemy Characters plus one Ally and the player (weapon) in the level. It just about plays OK at 18fps lowest fps at start when all are alive and active, rising to 36fps when all Characters are dead including my Ally friend. Grass and trees have no affect here when no enemies exist. 36 fps is the max I would get in an empty level. You should be able to at least double the density of the foliage seen here without any real impact. There are no real optimisation techniques used in this level. You might be able to Load and Unload foliage entities on player proximity to good effect.
Filling a whole outdoor FPSC level with dense foliage would be a worthwhile test - not sure if anyone has done it?
