Incremental movement & terrains

Hey everyone, how it going?

I have 2 questions!

a) I want to position an entity incrementally by 5 (without going in between) either in front, behind or to the sides of it depending on mouse movement. I use position entity but it goes too fast and looks like move entity. Its probably VERY simple, but how would I solve this?

b) For a terrain made out of a mesh (not an actual terrain), how many polys would you reccomend it be?

Thanks for your help!

a) Divide your mouse movement by some number say 3 or 5.

b) My favorite is 10 meter tiles (100 blitz units), each tile is a quad (made up of two triangles), Each mesh has 32x32 tiles, I then arrange 8 meshes x 8 meshes to make up the world that 256x256 or 2560m x 2560m. I use a single surface for each mesh.

I'll share some sample code if your interested. There are many solutions to get results you want, I hope this info helps.

a) newx = 5 * floor( mousex() / 5 )

b) .. best to go with a similar system to what wayne suggests as blitz will automatically cull the terrain entities not in view.

Thanks Wayne & Stevie, Ill get cracking! :-)

Sorry, I have another question...If something isn't visible, does its still take up computing power?. For example if I was to have a mesh with 60,000 verticies but it was invisible, would this affect my performance much?

It really depends on what you're using this mesh for? Collisions? Note that each surface in blitz has a maximum poly count, around 33k, so if you exceed this then you'll get a MAV at renderworld()