I'm actively developing a small Game with the Ogre Engine, with the "Managed"-Ogre (MOgre) Library to be exact.
In my Case, I want to generate a "Level", basically containing 50x50 Tiles of Levelspace. Thats mathematically seen 2500 Wall-Objects at its Maximum, minor the Pathways. In addition to that, we have a Blanket and a Floor Tile on each Spot with no wall, so that once the Level is loaded - we have about 3000-3500 Objects in Scene. I don't wanna get into the details about Spawning Items, Enemies, etc. - but you can guess that a completely Loaded Scene has about 5k-7k Objects in the end.
Well, to get to the Point I want to mention and ask for, is the waiting time of about 2-3 Minutes to get all of this Objects into the Scene. Everyone playing a game up and once knows - thats pretty much too long to "play a round".
I in fact do preload the meshes and stuff by regularly initialize the Ogre ResourceManager. I know that Ogre has the Objects in its memory, due to the fact that I am able to delete the Assets after initializing, and anyway I'm able to load more Objects into the Scene after deleting them. ("So what's taking so long!?")
I read some stuff about that. Two steps have to be done to get Objects into the scene they said - first it has to be loaded from the Harddisk - well, done. The Initialisation of the ResourceManager takes like nothing. The second step is to get the Object into the Videocards-memory - I'm not sure about that point, where this happens. It's some interesting information, but nothing of this helps me here in the first place.
I tried to achieve my goal by using another approach: I'm currently creating about 500 Walls and 100 Blankets/Floors into the scene right after starting the Program - and use them as a base for each level by just reposition them - but to be honest, that takes really nearly the same time, so that I'm at a point where I'm generally confused if I'm doing something wrong in general...
Perhaps anyone could give me a hint of another approach, or post some kind of Thread-Link where I can read some other stuff about that - that would be fine!?
EDIT:
I just read something about Ogre v1 and Ogre v2 - I didn't know about that. The days I downloaded the MOgre Library was before that. In the of the Versions it is written, that the Ogre v1 Engine (wich MOgre was build up on I guess) just supports up to 1000 Objects with good Performance. That should explain the circumstances... Nevertheless - I don't find a NET Wrapper for the v2 Version. In case of "not existing" some ideas to make this realizable would be nice. In case of an existing wrapper - where the hell do I download the library!?
Chillfaktor