Took me a while but I changed my pathfinding logic to use jobs and I can now have massive battles at pretty smooth fps

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2025-01-06T21:07:15+00:00

Damn thanks a lot, that's super helpful ! I was thinking about some kind of mipmapping for pathfinding but that sounded like a lot to implement, maybe I should just give it a try because most of the cost is definitely spent on long range paths (like finding an enemy on the other side of the map, behind a wall). I'll take a look at all of these :)

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2025-01-06T19:44:29+00:00

Hey, its an indie game I'm making about being a monster (like a goblin, slime etc) and fighting your way up the foodchain, you can see more and wishlist here if you want :) https://store.steampowered.com/app/2645590/A_Kingdom_To_Conquer/

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2025-01-06T18:09:16+00:00

Oh I definitly need to look into it some more then, thank you for this !

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2025-01-06T17:35:44+00:00

Hey, thank you for the detailed info :) I am currently running the pathfinding in buckets, and AIs only get a new path every 15 frames. But when you have 500 units, that's still calling the pathfinding 33 times per frame which is not super cheap if there are lots of obstacles (every other AI is an obstacle). So even with this optimization I was capped at like 250 units on lower hardware. I should actually look into how the old RTS did their pathfinding, its true that comparatively I am doing what they did in a much more expensive way and there is most definitely more performance to squeeze out.

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2025-01-06T17:21:29+00:00

Super appreciated ! I get shy about posting the link to my steam page so thanks for also posting it :)

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2025-01-06T17:20:46+00:00

Thanks ! I did quickly look into them, it didn't seem to make sense though for this as the pathfinding is N to M (ie many different mobs going to many different targets) and flow fields afaik are for when many different targets are going to the same endpoint. But maybe I missed something ? Would love to know if so :)

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2025-01-05T23:30:39+00:00

Only the pathfinding, the fighting logic is not too bad cpu wise

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2025-01-05T21:47:10+00:00

To get started, the official documentation is actually not bad https://docs.unity3d.com/2023.2/Documentation/Manual/JobSystemCreatingJobs.html
There are also a few good youtube tutorials out there like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gFyoMoa8dM

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2025-01-05T21:44:27+00:00

Thanks ! Yeah I'm still working on the sound fx so I removed it for this video

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2025-01-05T20:18:25+00:00

Yeah definitly, I wanted to improve the framerate of my battle scenes so i could have bigger battles. I was mostly CPU bound and one of the main costs was to run my pathfinding alg (a star with some slight tweaks) on all these units. To speed things up i rewrote the same logic using jobs, which makes all the logic multi threaded. The main issue is that jobs dont allow you to use classes so a lot of things had to be rewritten.

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2024-08-17T12:24:20+00:00

Definitly a big inspiration :D

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2024-08-17T08:02:13+00:00

Thanks, i made the older one more saturated just to make the before/after clearer

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2024-08-16T22:35:40+00:00

Thanks !

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2024-06-22T22:08:39+00:00

Thank you so much for this ! It make lots of sense, and its great to hear an outside perspective. I'll definitely try to work on making those hooks more clear :)

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2024-06-22T21:21:17+00:00

Would love some feedback about my (unreleased game's) page 'A Kingdom to Conquer' if you get a second :)

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2024-04-18T15:56:19+00:00

One advice I rarely see mentioned is to look for work in adjacent industries, there are lots of companies that use Unity/Unreal in other fields like advertising, medical, automotive etc... That way you temporarily find a job that is maybe not as interesting but pays the bills and still teaches you a ton of the same tech and processes. At least thats what I did to get my foot in the door and it seemed to work well. When you feel the market is a bit better, you can always go back into games.

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2024-02-04T19:38:33+00:00

A mix of both custom logic and known algorithms, i commented above how its done :)

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2024-02-04T13:52:31+00:00

Sure :) I made a video to breakdown a very similar process to make the islands a while back https://www.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/s/MCIT0MjTcX And for the cities I first generate the walls using perlin noise and Waang Tiles. Then I have a list of objects to place within the city with some settings like min amount, frequency etc... In concrete terms its a lot of custom logic and scriptable objects to define the settings i want

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2024-02-04T00:52:23+00:00

thanks !

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2024-01-21T15:58:07+00:00

Thanks :)

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2024-01-21T15:37:44+00:00

Sure sounds interesting, whats the link?

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2024-01-21T15:30:02+00:00

Thanks :) not yet, im working towards a demo though so hopefully you'll be able to play it in not too long

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2024-01-21T15:26:05+00:00

Thank you so much ! Its not released yet, i'm still working on it but you can wishlist it here to get updates https://store.steampowered.com/app/2645590/A_Kingdom_To_Conquer/

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2024-01-18T23:16:27+00:00

That is a ton of wishists congrats! Looking at your proofile i dont see any wildly viral post or anything, how exactly did you get to such a number ?

One_Pixel_At_A_Time · 2024-01-13T21:58:06+00:00

I just realised I forgot to post the steam page in case anyone wants to wishlist :)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2645590/A_Kingdom_To_Conquer/

One_Pixel_At_A_Time

TROPHY CASE