Well, I've been working on my submission for povcomp and I've run into a bit
of a problem.

I planned on constructing my scene in levels of detail. The lowest level of
detail is a series of simple objects. Then I've assembled lots of those into
a bunch of second-level objects. Finally, I'm combining tons of those to
create the scene.

Unfortunately, even though some of the lowest level objects are meshes, the
duplication of all of the second level objects to create the scene is using
a huge amount of memory. I've hit half a gig of RAM and I've only made about
1/10 as many objects as I planned to. (Actually, to some extent, making more
objects probably won't increase the memory usage too much since they'll just
replace copies of existing objects which take up about the same amount of
RAM.)

I need to reduce my memory usage. I've considered making lower-detail
versions of second level objects for the ones that will be really far away,
but even if that does help it might as much as double the amount of work I
have to do in terms of modelling, and I can't sacrifice *all* detail, so it
might not even help that much.

What I really feel that I need is a way to copy an object without actually
duplicating it, much like the way that mesh data is copied. I recognize that
this would come at the expense of some rendering speed (mainly because the
unions can't be split for bounding), but that doesn't bother me so much. Is
there a way to do this or an unnofficial version that supports it?

Or does anyone have any suggestions for me?

 - Slime
 [ http://www.slimeland.com/ ]

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