I realise this may well be a case of, just stress test it and stop worrying, but I've been pondering about using Godot 4's decals for things like labels, posters and other little details in game worlds, decals make everything wonderfully easy, one thing I did for example recently is I made a bowling ball and put some 'holes' on it by placing the cubes on the bowling bowl and it worked great having them as a child of the bowling ball itself when it moved. If I started sticking up other stuff would it significantly impact the performance? My first though is no surely not because they're not expensive nodes, but I barely know anything about the back end of decals so it would be nice to know for sure and calculate.

Edit: Now I'm wondering if I made a thread on this before because I'm thinking about it a lot lol.

  • Yeah, just stress test using several times as many decals as you'll ever possibly need, on the weakest hardware you intend to support.

    Decals basically work by projecting a transparent textured mesh onto the target object like Blender's Shrinkwrap modifier (in Projection mode). Dynamic decals could be somewhat expensive if you use a lot of them. Static decals should be cheap though, as the projection only needs to be done once. Your decal is static relative to your rolling bowling ball, so I imagine you won't have any performance problems with that.

Yeah, just stress test using several times as many decals as you'll ever possibly need, on the weakest hardware you intend to support.

Decals basically work by projecting a transparent textured mesh onto the target object like Blender's Shrinkwrap modifier (in Projection mode). Dynamic decals could be somewhat expensive if you use a lot of them. Static decals should be cheap though, as the projection only needs to be done once. Your decal is static relative to your rolling bowling ball, so I imagine you won't have any performance problems with that.