Multiple placements of single simobject?

[spotlope]

I have a use case that doesn't seem to have been covered by the docs - or at least not that I've found. I want to use SODE to place grass clump models with conditional textures based on the month of year. In testing, it seems as though I can have only one placement rule per Model entry. Is that right? When I add multiple placements for a single model, none of the objects display.

Of course, I could do a separate SimObject entry for each clump, but the resulting XML file would be massive, as I have several hundred placements, and each would need its own conditional display blocks for all seasons. What I'd prefer is to set up a rule for a single model with its conditions, and reuse this for multiple placements. Is that possible?

thanks,
Bill

 

[12bPilot]

Hi Bill,

Multiple placement of the same object is indeed only possible by copy-pasting the entire xml code block.
However, this scenario is not desirable from my perspective, especially for small clutter objects. What I would suggest (and I successfully implemented this for the vegetation in my FlyLogic LSZG airport scenery) is to export all bits making up the vegetation into one single mdl file. This would result in one SimObject entry in the xml and is really easy to maintain.

Placing hundreds of SimObjects will have a hard hit on fps, so whenever possible put as much as possible into one mdl file which performs way better!

 

[spotlope]

Thanks for the reply, Jeffrey. Ordinarily that's exactly the approach I would take, but in this case the grass is placed on hilly terrain, which is why it's done in small clumps that can conform to the change in elevation.