The principle is this DeathShadow ....
I want 50 bad guys, who're all exactly the same to come at me with baseball bats and spread my brains and other internal organs along the floor. Each model contains a bunch of textures that takes up say 500kb of texture graphics card memory. There is also a bunch of mesh info, animation info etc. (all quite small) that goes into main memory.
Using your idea, I'd set up a for loop and load the same model into 50 different object numbers. This would result in my loading the mesh, animation and texture info 50 times into different areas of memory. 500kb x50 = 25MB. That's 25MB of texture memory taken up by the same 500kb textures.
By cloning an option you load up one instance of the object into memory. Each clone would then have it's own entity data, but would share the same texture data, model data, animation data etc. and therefore for the same 50 models, you'd only need the 500kb of texture memory taken up.
The only negative point is if you want to be able to do mesh deformation, or texture editing etc etc. on one model. I believe with clone object, editing one model in this way would effect all of the other models.
Machine: P4 2200, 512MB, GeForce4 64MB, Audigy Platinum
There's a junglist inside every coder. http://www.kontact-kru.com for my own personal breakbeat terrorism.
