Several hundred characters

[Hrolf]

I'm thinking about a wargame with lots of agents - several hundred at least - and how to display them. The 3D view would never show more than (approx) 100 agents as you can never see the whole map in 3D. What's the best way to do this? I want 2 armies with 5 different soldier types, so only 10 actual models, but 100s of instances all in potentially different poses (think Age of Empires &c). Is there an optimal way of doing this in jPCT for realtime 3D display?

[EgonOlsen]

Discarding objects that are outside the screen should be quite fast, rendering 100 low poly models at a time should be doable too. Maybe you should write a simple test case to try it out. Another option is to render farer away characters into a texture once at use that texture multiple times as a kind of billboard (called imposters). I've never tried this but some games are doing it to display a larger amount of objects and/or trees.

[Hrolf]

That's pretty nearly what I thought I'd have to do, but I thought of rendering all the models facing in (say) 8 directions to images at startup for billboarding, then discarding the models. I hadn't thought of mixing both at runtime. Thanks!