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Hey,
I've mused about this before in other posts but i'm on about the.. i guess fastest, way to have your levels. One object or many.

I've decided probably the fastest thing I could do would be to merge all objects into one and then render it in game using an occlusion culling shader. Should work out as pixel perfect vertex hiding, not drawing anything that was obscured by anything else and what not, right?

So i'm wondering about the compilation of such a level. Presuming your level editor lets you make your world out of seperate objects and prefabs etc, whats the best way to merge it all into one final object when you compile the level? Now I noticed a vertex command for adding vertex data to an object which sounds like a good place to start to me, i'm pretty sure that using that or at the very least using memblocks i could make up an "object" of everything merged, but what is totally puzzling me is how textures would react to this. Does using the vertex commands to add the vertex data of other objects to the world mesh keep the texture data and texture name so all i have to do is save off the object and then load it with all the textures of the seperate objects in the right place, or do i have to somehow compile some sort of texture map and maybe even have to calculate the uv for each new vertex in the world mesh? (gulp)

if anyone could shed some light on this, appreiciated

No. Each mesh has only up to 8 UV coordinates that reference one texture per object. When you pull new vertices into another object and, say, those verts use set 0 of UV's, they will now use whatever texture was assigned to the object you are adding them to. So, unless you can keep your level down to the same 8 textures (and even then the videocard must have 8 texture stages for you to be able to use them all) you won't be able to seamlessly merge them together.

so what is the solution? How can I build one solid, textured, world object from all the prefabs and whatnot that would be placed in my level editor?

I belive cartography shop allows you to export a world as one object and although i dont know if it lets you use prefabs (never used the program) I assume you can use multiple textures on different walls, floors, ceilings, etc to make your level. How does it go about making all that into one textured object?

Thanks in advance.

It doesn't ... at least when you export as an X object, using either the default exporter, or the one that I wrote.

Each mesh is currently exported as a separate limb. Just load a level, and run a PERFORM CHECKLIST FOR OBJECT LIMBS and display the results, and you'll see. You can also see that it's possible to have multiple textures per mesh too (see the attached zip)

So, what you want is certainly possible, but it's not a direction I want to take the exporter I've written ... I want just the opposite, easily controllable limbs.