Context: When placed in community folder (bc that’s when instancing takes effect)
Bug description: When a scenery object is instanced they always snap to ground in the built package. I wasn’t sure if this was some sort of intended limitation but the more I think about it the less it makes sense to me personally. (have to admit I am not too familiar with the topic so I appreciate it if someone could tell me more why this would be a limitation, but I have read different scales, rotations, and locations in theory should all be possible with instancing)
See, the way I understand it, since they snap to ground anyways, when the ground elevation changes the instanced object does too. So there has to be some height information somewhere, and that obviously isn’t the same for all objects. So why can’t we set that offset manually and have instanced objects at different heights?
There are plenty of usecases for this. Cars in a multistorey car park, people inside the terminal on different floors of the building, or apron objects like cones placed on various elevated objects on the apron (as seen here).
I have also tested to see if adding a collision to the concrete might help. Unfortunately no luck. Neither a mesh collision nor a simple collider helps Which again makes me question why since the collision of the ground is obviously still being considered by instanced objects.
In a whole project people and objects like cones alone could save hundreds of drawcalls if we were able to instance them but atm we can’t due to them being snapped to the ground.
Repro steps: Offset instanced objects vertically and load scenery in comm folder.
Oh! Thank you, Boris! Sorry for the duplicate. I was looking for a similar report already as I was surprised no one had reported it before but I couldn’t find a similar thread. My bad and thanks for fixing this. This is huge!
On that note, if you don’t mind, I have a quick other question about instancing. Like I mentioned I don’t have a full understanding about the limitations of instancing objects, but that’s why I wanted to ask if it’s, in theory, possible to allow instanced object to use the “NO SNOW” option too?
Like I said, I would love to instance our static interior people which is now possible thanks to the aforementioned fix, but, in SU4 at least, instanced objects always take on snow. In fact, if you set the object to “NO SNOW” before instancing it actually corrupts the XML and you can’t build the project anymore. Is this also fixed in SU5 now? Or, if not, is it possible? And if so, could you maybe look into that too? This would truly be a leap in terms of optimisation as it would allow us to instance interior pax without any sort of limitations.
If that’s the case I would make a new bug report mentioning that so that it’s easier for you to track. Let me know if somehow possible and if so I’ll create the report!
We are not 100% sure we can add the option to mass instanced objects but we have a task in the backlog to check and, if possible, add the support.
You can create a bug report, I will then track it and let you know when I have some update to share.
Which again makes me question why since the collision of the ground is obviously still being considered by instanced objects.
