Hi EvilRadish,
This comes up often actually and can be debated for either method. The idea is to use modular design so that you can use the same mesh over and over with fewer need for objects that are unique and will only be used once. This is great for level design. However, people tend to over use modularity by making very small walls that can be pieced together like your example above. It's better to use your second example where your wall is much longer.
The reason that I would not suggest for your first example is that if you have a lot of these wall pieces loaded in a single view, let's say you have a room and there are ~30 of these small wall pieces that make up this view you now have 30 draw calls, which can hinder performance. If you use the longer piece and we say that there are only 6 used you now only have 6 draw calls for these static meshes. This does not include the draw calls for whatever material is being applied to the meshes, but just the static meshes being loaded. So in this example you've save ~24 draw calls by just using a larger wall piece.
I hope this helps and if anything is confusing or I didn't explain it well enough let me know.
Tim
answered
Nov 04 '15 at 03:07 PM
Tim Hobson ♦♦ STAFF
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