Voxel Area Drawtype for Entities

[appgurueu]

Problem

Large and dynamic clusters of nodes currently require a ton of attached nodelike entities to be rendered. This is very bad for performance and still fails to provide all drawtypes.

Solutions

A "voxelarea" drawtype for entities, (roughly) a content_id property (array), param1 (array), param2 (array), width/height/length. Then the meshgen could generate the required models.

Additional context

A compromise on Voxel Area Entities.

[Warr1024]

This could be used to performance-optimize falling_node entities, e.g. at least doing only one entity per column instead of one per node, across almost all games...

[rubenwardy]

This would be a good stepping stone in isolating the node rendering, it should only be used for small numbers of node due to staticdata persistence

[hecktest]

-1 for fixed dimensions

[appgurueu]

-1 for fixed dimensions

Dimensions would not be fixed, but the server has to know them in order to map indices to positions.

[hecktest]

I'd just rather have the real thing. This doesn't handle collision, for example.

[Bituvo]

Is this still being talked about?

[appgurueu]

Well, it is not "cancelled", but it is also a nontrivial feature request. Today I'd probably tend to agree with hecks that ideally we'd strive for "the real thing" (VAEs) right away.