I suggest making a function to handle standard object types - like one for face culling, one for transparent textures (which usually need face culling disabled) etc etc. That way your program is more compact and takes less memory - making it faster. Always setup the object after loading too.
Here's a nice little one - check to see if an object is visible before deciding to hide it, like:
'To hide it
If object hidden(n)=1 then hide object n
'To show it
If object hidden(n)=0 then show object n
Not sure about that OBJECT HIDDEN bit, might be another command - but it's faster to check the hidden state of an object than it is to hide or show it - therefor hiding or showing objects when they are already in the required state is not wise.
Scraggle,
The very fastest way to handle all those bullets is with no objects at all, why not look into instant hit methods, more realistic anyway. If you need to see the bullets, then a sphere is the last thing you should use, a rotate plain with a round texture, ghosted perhaps, or a really low polygon mesh - Never a sphere, they're far too high poly. I would create them at initiation, creating objects is slower than showing them, but 500 us a helluva lot for poor old DB/DBPro.
People are often tempted to lock the frame rate on their games - but it's often a much better idea to impliment time based motion, so instead of something moving 1 unit per loop, it might move 100 units per second, this would iron out all the speed inconsistances and keep the gameplay going. The last thing you want is slowdown, with time based motion your PC can go as fast as it wants, and the engine will just get smoother if there's extra horsepower.
Precalculate as much as possible. For example, if your firing a bullet in an FPS, calculate where the bullet will land and how far away the destination is when you initilise the bullet - this means you only check the wall collision once, you have a preset destination that you can stick a bullet hole decal at, you don't need to check wall collision while the bullet is in flight - you only need to check for character collisions (which can be far easier and faster by using limb positions and bounding boxes).
Van-B
I laugh in the face of fate!
