When you start Game Studio the back ground has grid squares. What are the units of measure on the squares (Kilometers, meters;…) where are the change settings located?
thanks in advance
A “unit” is whatever you want it to be, could be meters, yards, etc. There is no fixed unit of measurement.
thanks. Nice and flexible
As long as you don’t use physics a unit has whatever meaning you want.
If you do use physics, the default unit is one meter, but if you want it to be something else and still have realistic physics (esp. gravity) you can either change it in each Rigidbody component or by code in a script: this.GetSimulation().Gravity.
Update: after talking with my colleagues is appears to be a bit more involved than just impacting the physics (you’ll have to forgive me for not knowing all the details. I’m a tool guy but it’s nice to be learning new stuff everyday).
The reason is physics is not the only part of the engine that will be impacted if you decide to use a different unit than one meter. For example physically-based rendering also makes the one-meter assumption for thing such as conservation of energy.
Also you have to note than if for example you change the unit to be 10 meters, some surface calculation will need to be 100 times higher (square value) and some 3d calculation will need to be 1000 times higher (cubic value). Lighting si directly impacted by those changes (e.g. light intensity, radius of a point-light or spot-light, etc.).
Long story short, if you don’t use 1 unit = 1 meter, some assumptions won’t hold, so be careful.
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I’m not sure if this is the right forum post to discuss this but if you have a model where you say 1 meter = 1 inch hypothetically. Than your model that is lets say a person 71 Inches (5’11") high would be 71 units. Would that be correct?
I think you met to say 1 unit = 1 inch. Not 1 Meter. If so I would agree with your logic. What prompted my original question is the need for a clickable grid, boxes that represent the X,Y coordinate.
Sorry for the delay I have been doing a lot of research so I’m not wasting anyone time.
When I look at this if i have the person at 5’11" which comes out to be ruffly 71 units.
I am creating a world map for rts battlefield and I want to be able to support massive maps in game. So this poses a question of performance. In the real world 1 meter = 39.3701 inches with this in mind should I convert all my inches / feet into meter and use that as a scale instead of using 1 unit = 1 inch? I would think doing this would easy hardware requirements in the long run because the maps and assets would be generally smaller? So my person of 5’11" would really be 1.8034 meters.
Am I on the right path for performance and physics?
So after importing a few terrain in blender then exporting to fbx and importing into Xenko it seems based on the grid system of Xenko that a terrain model of more then 20 grid squares start to lag Xenko down. Right now I have a 36 grid squares, square model for a terrain and Xenko just can not handle it in the editor or in the game even if I adjust the far plane clipping.
Now blender has this terrain set at 316 Meter long and wide, and has a vertices count of 2,099,201 which is very detailed terrain. Does anyone know what Xenko can handle as a total of vertices in a scene?
I would recommend you to work with metric units rather than imperials when it comes to any game engine. Because that’s how most work. Use 1 meter = 1 Unit in Xenko, that will save you a lot of trouble since that is how Bullet works per default behind (correct me if I’m wrong).
As far as I know. I’ve been able to throw a million poly from a show-reel mode (not game-ready at all) and still had a solid 90 fps. But that’s sadly all I could tell you. 
Thank you very much for your reply. So after messing with it more last night I put the terrain into blender and reduced the verts/tri using a modifier. I got it down to around 500k which seem to do the trick in xenko.
As for scaling using a model that is 1.8 meter high i put it on the terrain and started scaling it to standard scales. I found that I think 1/16 scale is probably the best for what I’m looking for as to how the RTS will look when the camera passes over it.
Here is our automation build script of the game as it sits right now. It will be different tomorrow as it is automatically built every morning for the team.