Last night I decided to completely trash my A* pathfinding, it just was not good enough for big maps and huge number of subjects. After 14 hours, everything is now re-coded and re-thinked. Now game can run 2000 population simulation at 1920×1080 resolution and maintain solid 30+ fps (tested on late 2016 Macbook Pro, i7, Radeon pro 455).
Before optimizations even population of 1000 forced frame rate to drop below 20 fps .
Main problem was with pathfinding and zombies human detection, but now with multithreaded pathfinding with heap-indexing and whatnots I would think that real gaming setups could easily simulate over 5000 people infections.
But with great speed, comes great sacrifices 😦
- My glorious civilian models were about 3500 verts each. Now they are only 413 and look horrible from close distance. But in game it does not really show.
- No more realistic collision detection, characters will overlap and no more zombie-piles. Collision detection is playable at 1000 humans, but after that only really beefy CPU:s can handle them (I will try to find some middle-ground solution for this).
But hey! Say hello to our main protagonist,
Officer Bob!
Yup, there is our main player character in all his glory! No more Mr Green Pea.
pandemicz.net 