Dividing 3D World into Cells

HEEEEELP

So I am quite bothered with this problem!

I want to know how you can divide a 3D world which is a singular node/parent node into a grid that you can unload and load anytime!

This is what was written inside the Godot Documentary about this topic:

Large worlds If you are making large worlds, there are different considerations than what you may be familiar with from smaller games. Large worlds may need to be built in tiles that can be loaded on demand as you move around the world. This can prevent memory use from getting out of hand, and also limit the processing needed to the local area. There may also be rendering and physics glitches due to floating point error in large worlds. You may be able to use techniques such as orienting the world around the player (rather than the other way around), or shifting the origin periodically to keep things centred around Vector3(0, 0, 0).

HERE'S THE LINK: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/optimization/optimizing_3d_performance.html#large-worlds

So I know there is a way to make it work based on the documentary but how do you do it?

Thank you Guys very much!

WhereAreMyPants

First thing I have to say, don't bother with optimization until you have something to optimize. Make your 3d world first, then worry about where you can improve performance.

To answer your question : Loading a part the world can be made through instantiating a scene, and unloading is deleting the corresponding node via the queue_free method. You might have to save modifications to that part of the world to a file and load that file when it comes into view again.

HEEEEELP

@WhereAreMyPants yeah I know that I can queuefree() and load() to get the “chunks” and delete them. But how do I divide the world into these chunks??? Do I need to do this manually or can it be done by code???

Megalomaniak

If it is something you've manually created in a external DCC(Digital Content Creation) suite then you should probably divide it into chunks there and export each of these separate. Make sure you have a good naming convention that makes it easier to keep track of what chunk is neighbors with what other chunk etc.

WhereAreMyPants

As @Megalomaniak said. You will have to split the meshes into those chunks manually (although an algorithm that does so automatically could be implemented, but it doesn't exist as is in Godot). Blender and most 3d asset creation tools support boolean operations which you can use to do so.