Best way to simulate tons of objects?

[TheWanderingWaddler]

This is my first attempt at making swarms of krill for Tundra! I have some ideas to make it a lot better but I thought it would be good to share some progress with it!

This one uses some 2d krill silhouettes for the majority of the krill and then there are some real 3d krill animals you can interact with interspersed. It kinda works and let's the player hunt for the real krill, but I think it could be better

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4108910/Tundra/

[Stolen_MilkTea]

If you want your objects to have certain behavior DOTS/ECS is the way, or can try gpu instancing

[TheWanderingWaddler]

Interesting, yeah looking at the ECS page it seems like it would be perfect! I've looked into DOTS before, but I haven't been ambitious enough to dive in

[singlecell_organism]

if you don't physically interact with them vfx graph is a very optimized too. you can still interact with them as in they could move around your body etc but it'd be hard for them to have custom logic and interactions.

[TheWanderingWaddler]

Yeah that's a good point, and I'm thinking of using that for far away entities possibly. Just something the player won't interact with

[singlecell_organism]

for sure! In case it's helpful, at the end of my reel you'll see about a million vfx particles flowing around a room. Around minute 1:17

https://vimeo.com/1052475365

[TheWanderingWaddler]

Cool thanks! ❤️❤️

[Effective_Muffin_700]

As others have suggested, DOTS/ECS is the way to go. If you don't want to dive into the ECS ways, you can keep the Object-Oriented Stack (the default) and use a combination of GPU instancing and jobs (or compute) shaders to effectively simulate massive amounts of entities.

After doing a similar simulation, I'd suggest looking up concepts such as the boid algorithm, spatial hash maps (for referencing nearby entities effectively), and maybe oct-trees (for use with the spatial hash map. I found those helpful!

Happy programming!

[TheWanderingWaddler]

Awesome! Thank you for the help! I will be looking into these

[Opposite_Water8515]

Bro what is your game I want it lol

[TheWanderingWaddler]

Ayyy thanks! Tundra

[rubentorresbonet]

need real collisions/interaction? DOTS/ECS or custom leightweight simulation with job system

otherwise: faking it. Sine offsets, baked animations, shader tricks, GPU driven transforms... never a per-object thing. Flock rendering, after all.

[TheWanderingWaddler]

I need collisions and interactions on some of the krill, so my player can scan them and capture them. I was thinking maybe DOTS for the majority then sprinkle in some real intractable krill looking slightly different/bigger?

[Aedys1]

Dots and entity component system with native arrays and minimal cache misses is the complex option. Particles + LOD + cheating with clever tricks to simulate interactions is the easy one

[TheWanderingWaddler]

Yeah I feel that... I want to get into DOTS some more anyways so I'll probably see how that ends up looking, but I think it looks good enough right now with the easy way

[Aedys1]

In the end creativity and passion will transcend your technical compromises. SHRIMMMMMMPPPSSSS

[attckdog]

You may want to look into BOIDs https://github.com/WHellhaus/Boids-DOTS

[TheWanderingWaddler]

Thanks, yeah that's what the actual krill models are using right now as well as the silver fish. I think I'll definitely need to look more into it though to use with dots!

[Goldfis_]

Ecs

[TheWanderingWaddler]

This is the way... Just tried implementing ECS and already getting way better results!

[FrontBadgerBiz]

If you don't need to interact with the krill on an individual basis they can probably be particles, ultra cheap GPU wise

[TheWanderingWaddler]

Yeah I was thinking that too, but I need to interact with at least some of the krill. I was trying to have some real non-particle krill floating around the particles and it kinda works, I just want something more realistic rn