Instancing in renderer

[heinezen]

Instancing describes the process of drawing multiple objects with the same uniform data in a single draw call. We could use this technique for objects that look the same and just have different positions in the scene. Viable candidates from AoE2 would be:

• ambient objects (cliffs, grass, cactus)
• resources (trees, stone/gold mines)
• (some) buildings

Rendering these objects all at once could save a lot of rendering time.

To implement this, the renderer needs to have a mechanism to figure out which objects are part of which instance. We could assign animations to instances via the nyan API. This would make instances available via manual configuration. An automated mechanism would probably be much more tricky.