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Hi. I'm an experienced programmer but very new to DBP. I'm making a very extensive space adventure game and to save loading time, I want to clone 1000 ships from a source of a few dozens directx models. (Creating one at a time takes about 30 seconds to load.) I have noticed that one can clone an object that has a single texture without problems. However, trying to clone an object of more than one texture results in the clone having no textures at all. I suppose I could make all my ship models from single textures but doing so is very difficult, even using 3D Canvas Pro's unwrap feature. If anyone has any suggestions or advice I would be very greatful. Thanks!

OK, after about a day of trial and error I narrowed down the problem. It seems I can clone multitextured objects properly if I save them as .3ds rather than .x files. I'm not sure if this is a bug in DBP or 3D Canvas Pro which I use to export the models. Perhaps someone can try it with another modeling program and let me know. This info may be useful to others using the same technique to generate many objects quickly (and hide those not in view) I have 1000 complex ships and 100 planets loading in about 5-6 seconds and I'm maintaining a frame rate of 85 on my high-end alienware even with a radar hud displaying 100 enemy ships. By the way, .x files clone more than twice as fast so if your objects have only one texture I recommend still using .x files. Once I get better at this language I plan to teach one of my beginners computer programming courses with it. I am very impressed with it so far. I'll post my game once I finish the first level- perhaps in two or three months.

OK, I'll bump this one to the top once to see if anyone can give me any information on this. I would think it is a fairly common problem, but I have not been able to find or get any information on it. I'll also add a new question. I know that some 3D functions slow down dramatically as the total number of objects increases (such as delete object and texture object). For example, in the top down view of my space game, I used 25 randomly textured planes to create the moving star field. Every few seconds, a set of five were retextured. The procedure worked very well untill I loaded 2000 hidden objects. Then, retexturing just 5 objects with small 128X128 textures caused a 50-100 millisecond blip. I found a way around this but my my question is this: Does anyone know of a list of which 3D functions are and which functions are not effected by the total number of objects. This would be a very useful list to save a lot of trial and error learning. I find that repositioning objects for example does not seem to ever suffer slow down. Thanks. Great forums by the way, very helpful.