Idears for optimisations

Community Feedback
1

I just watched the recent desktop tuesdays and really liked the progress you guys are making and the idears you are toying with.

What sparked an idear was the exploration system that will spawn more bioms near you after you used the meguffins.
The natural problem that develops is that you get vast maps and big areas to travel and it would rather make sence to create multipel towns then and maybe little trading posts on the way between them. that would vastly expand the number of hearthlings you would need. But the plus would be that you develop an multi town system that can focus on producing certain things that the new recourses allow. Than bringing it back with cariages or horseback to the main town to develop it more would be fantastic.

But how to handel all these masses of hearthlings and new animations? i think a new approach on what we the players are for the heartlings would make it possibel. Maybe we could become their God and we start out with a small shrine instead of the fire. With that we could argue that if you zoom out a lot that all our heartlings become small spirit orbs that just wonder around and only if we focus on them we see them fully. With that you could input an drawzone for heartlings animations and complexitiy what in other way would open up the world to be more expansive and more complex. And with the god argument it wouldnt break our imersion that we sometimes need to scroll in and go up close to see our heartlings do their busy work.

Its a big streach but maybe this idear could help

Love the game and where you are going with it!

2

In my experience, the current problems with optimization with many hearthlings are not due to rendering them (GPU intensive), but due to having to calculate and simulate their actions (and for all objects they interact with). These calculations get very CPU intensive very fast. This can already be seen in the current game, where you still get a decent amount of fps with a large town, but hearthlings just stand around the campfire and stop doing anything when switching from normal speed to double speed (thus doubling the amount of calculations required).

Related to the multiple biomes, multiple towns thing. What I would find interesting is the possibility to temporary “leave” the current town and create a new town. While both towns will have to be simulated, this can be split up between multiple cores more easily due to having two distinct sets of hearthlings, items and tasks. This will even allow the two towns to be at the same location, but in this case will require two separate sets of farms, trapper areas, and stockpiles to still keep them apart.

1 Like
3

don’t really think that it would be that specific if it was implemented. its more about splitting the workload of a single intensive task by offloading it to multiple cores. the problem is, this requires a rework of the code and is only appropriate to do for some tasks. for things that are done very quickly trying to offload the task to multiple cores will actually slow it down. so you have to scrutinize everything you are doing and test it over and over again.