copymesh

Does copymesh copy a mesh and attached animations?

(Can't try this out at the moment - at work)

I wouldn't think so because there's no CopyAnimMesh()

Hmm. I'll do a test tonight.

Copyentity copies the animations if the mesh entity has animation.

If you really can't get away with using CopyEntity then you will have to use LoadAnimeMesh to load in the number of copies you need.

Is there much difference in time between using CopyMesh/CopyEntity and reloading the entire mesh from disk?

I've no real meshes on disk (yet) and I wanted to know this.
I'm planning to create a game where the meshes are loaded when needed.

I'm trying to create a space-sim (in the style of Freelancer or X-2).

I want to load the spacestations the moment the player enters a new sector (or system).

In X-2 you have sometimes 5 power plants in the same sector.
If I were to do the same, should I use CopyMesh or just load the same station 5 times?

Also, when using CopyMesh or CopyEntity, which one keeps the hierarchy intact?

I saw in the help-files that CopyMesh performs a "deep" copy, what do they mean by that?
Is it like reloading the mesh?

Copymesh copies the mesh. There is no animation and no relation to the mesh it is copied from. It is a brand new mesh.

CopyEntity should be called CloneEntity as it is still linked to the original. Moving a vert on the original will move a vert on all copies.

The power of CopyEntity is so you don't need to load a million of the same. You can still modify them in simple ways such as alpha and texture I think.

Copymesh also changes the number of surfaces. Copy a cylinder and count surfaces before and after.

also if you use copyentity, extract the animations from the original mesh and then use those to animate all copies.