Jens, 2009-05-04, From 3D model to interactive door in the HPL 2 engine

[Thomas]

Question to the devs: Does the game optimize walls/multiple objects in rendering? I'm pretty stupid in how engines work still, but in most game engines object calls are more demanding than polygon count.

Yup, the engine merges static objects of the same material in order to minimize the number of draw calls. Still it cannot merge all objects with same material, cause the occlusion culling (removing unseen objects) would not work. So trying to keep a good balance.

The fun thing in the new engine is that it automatically does all this. In the old engine (and many other engines) one has to set up all of this manually. For HPL2 there is no such thing to worry about, and focus can be put on creating nice levels instead!