Arcen Games

General Category => AI War II => Private Alpha Discussion => Topic started by: PokerChen on April 20, 2018, 11:29:09 am

Title: Lack of angry bee swarm for fighters and bombers
Post by: PokerChen on April 20, 2018, 11:29:09 am

I went back to the KS website and noticed that the concept video had fighters and bombers do their swarming thing. This isn't present in 0.719 -  out of curiosity, what happened to the gimmick?

Wasn't expecting to get Homeworld 2 style dogfights and bombing runs for release, but just wondering.

Title: Re: Lack of angry bee swarm for fighters and bombers
Post by: BadgerBadger on April 20, 2018, 12:20:57 pm

Chris could give a better response, but the short version is that the swarming turned out to be a much bigger performance bottleneck than anticipated, so it got the ax.

Title: Re: Lack of angry bee swarm for fighters and bombers
Post by: x4000 on April 20, 2018, 01:35:20 pm

Yep; my early tests had indicated that it would be feasible, and so we were proceeding as if it were.  However, on more extended testing it turned out there was a nonlinear expense to those sorts of swarming fighters.  They absolutely wreck the performance pretty fast.  So, much as I loved them, we had to ditch them.  The "trail renderers" that give the curvy contrails, too.

But I did figure out a clever way to give contrail-like effects to shots that are moving, so that's a thing. :)