Arcen Games

General Category => AI War II => Private Alpha Discussion => : PokerChen April 20, 2018, 11:29:09 AM

: Lack of angry bee swarm for fighters and bombers
: PokerChen 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.
: Re: Lack of angry bee swarm for fighters and bombers
: BadgerBadger 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.
: Re: Lack of angry bee swarm for fighters and bombers
: x4000 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. :)