Currently i have an internal homemade tree like structure for my game system (entities and entities properties and so on…). It works ok but i was challenging the possibility to use Panda Dummy nodepath instead.
I was thinking about creating a dummy hierarchy under hidden to store my data , this way i would be able to use the searching features of Panda for all my games objects.
I’ve got two concerns:
Does the number of dummy nodes under “hidden” affects significantly the rendering performance of panda ?
(standard number of entities is well below 1500 at all time currently)
I’m pretty sure that ‘hidden’ is never traversed by either the rendering or collision algorithms unless you explicitly ask it to be. So you should be able to put a (theoretically) infinite number of nodes under there without impacting render performance. This is in contrast to NodePath.hide(), which blocks a node that is a child of render from being rendered (i.e. node is “invisible to all cameras”) but still traverses it for other purposes, like collision detection.
Note that you could create your dummy hierarchy under any NodePath; it doesn’t even need to be hidden. For using the NodePath.find command, any arbitrary NodePath can serve as the root, even one that hasn’t been parented to anything.