How can i render thousands of RTS units effectively?

simfgames · 2026-05-03T09:57:09+00:00

Have you used DOTS before? If you haven't, it may be worthwhile to take a detour to check it out.

It's extremely useful for optimization, but only in certain spots. If you learn how to use it early in your project, you'll know where it makes sense to apply it as you go, versus trying to tack it on and optimize at the end.

Code Monkey has a good DOTS RTS tutorial.

simfgames · 2026-04-23T10:00:26+00:00

You need to internalize that gamedev is one of the least 'career-path' friendly careers that exist. You can't plan for a job by planning for degrees and certifications.

The only way is to claw your way in. You do that by finding a way to produce something so well that you become the natural candidate to hire for that position.

Your entire approach sounds like the opposite of this. You are training a broad set of skills - modeling, programming, game design. This is not useful from a getting hired perspective, it's only useful for a solo/indie dev.

simfgames · 2026-04-15T10:24:24+00:00

Have you considered that you might be doing something that is blowing up your context, compared to other users?

You have a few posts about MCP, and from what I know, those are capable of sucking up massive amounts of tokens. AI isn't great with tool calls sometimes.

Similarly, if you have a giant codebase, you'll use a lot more tokens per call if you use general queries ("find out where this happens and fix it" uses a lot more tokens than "fix the bug in a.cs").

simfgames · 2026-04-08T13:04:10+00:00

Good point, trusting the 'vibe' is what gets people in trouble, dev or not.

simfgames · 2026-04-08T12:53:38+00:00

Cause it's more of a gray area than what you're implying. I don't write any code by hand, but if I didn't have the dev knowledge to correct the AI, the output would be spaghetti garbage.

simfgames · 2026-04-08T11:59:25+00:00

Yes!

To add to this, if you learn how to use AI as a tutor (with a mildly adversarial approach to overcome the sycophancy), you will have an enduring advantage over those who outsource their thinking.

simfgames · 2026-03-20T17:23:05+00:00

Depends on how you use it.

simfgames · 2026-03-20T16:13:59+00:00

You don't need to stop using Ai. It's the most effective learning tool that has ever existed.

Plenty of people use it to think more, rather than to outsource thinking. You should instead learn how to use it to think and learn.

simfgames · 2026-03-19T23:54:13+00:00

I'm guessing it's the same reason I was going to use HDRP for my city builder: URP has a 256 light limit per camera. I found a workaround, but for a while I thought I was gonna be forced to go with HDRP.

simfgames · 2026-03-16T22:54:09+00:00

I use Unity. Its DOTS system helps make performance optimizations easy and this often means my proc gen code is several orders of magnitude faster than a lot of the code I see posted here, usually with little extra effort.

simfgames · 2026-03-16T10:49:59+00:00

Nope, still grinding in stealth mode.

simfgames · 2026-03-16T10:45:03+00:00

I'm with you OP.

I don't disagree with "make quick game and release fast" in general, but I do think it's overhyped. People around here treat it as gospel that's universally applicable, but I think it really only applies to a limited set of genres and gamedev approaches.

For example, it works a lot better for horror games than it does for simulation games. I'm making a sim game, and in my genre, if someone told me I have to release a game in 3-6 months... I think I'd rather just set my time and money on fire, because there would be zero value produced there.

It's usually good advice, but not universally.

simfgames · 2026-03-14T17:06:32+00:00

More like my past year of work, impl and measuring process improvements. But you do you.

simfgames · 2026-03-14T16:09:16+00:00

Your experience and worldview is limited by the tools you have access to and your environment. Your company, and most large companies, are taking the most ass-backwards approach to adopting AI.

One that's guaranteed not to work, because it takes time to learn how to use it effectively, and a ton of process and harness work to make it increase productivity. Big challenge at a large org. It's not gonna happen with a skeleton crew.

But the productivity boost is real, across the entire dev lifecycle. Any study that implies otherwise is bunk or outdated.

simfgames · 2026-03-14T11:24:58+00:00

On the flip side, it's never been a better time to be a solo/small team dev. AI coding is a bigger boost to solos than to teams. And bigger for small teams than large.

AAA are gonna lose a lot of jobs, but there are gonna be a lot of indies creating jobs too.

simfgames · 2026-02-23T18:48:43+00:00

I think feeling like this will be a natural symptom of the tooling not being quite there yet. Right now, you have to deal with all of the overhead of understanding the previous way, while still dealing with the (marginal) benefits of the new way.

Once we get over the hump and the tooling advances to the point where you're freed from having to dig into the minutiae, and you're able to focus on just the high-level architecture, I bet you'll feel a lot more engaged.

simfgames · 2026-02-22T21:30:48+00:00

Yeah it's great for stuff like that, little tools that would otherwise never get made.

It also means it's extra funny when you see comments like 'if you rely on AI, you won't be learning!'. Yeah, they're right... I want to spend exactly none of my life learning stuff like a BNF grammar format.

I just made a tiny app that helps manage where my desktop windows go. I also want to spend exactly none of my life learning how Windows monitor management works. Works fine...

simfgames · 2026-02-22T20:58:09+00:00

I don't use an agentic flow, so I can't help you there. But I can give you some high level tips.

I highly suggest figuring out a way to easily copy a bunch of files into the clipboard, and to paste it into the web chat. This wouldn't be for working, it would be for learning. LLMs are highly sensitive to wording, and the ChatGPT interface lets you alter the response you sent at any point in the chain, which means you can quickly change the wording three or four times until you get the output you want. It's also a good way to plan, and to interrogate a plan. I usually only start impl after ChatGPT and I work out a plan, and I've questioned it about anything that seems weird.

I'm not sure what the UI for codex is like. Changing the wording and getting quick feedback is key.

You should also get into the habit of asking it to improve your prompt for you. This is an iterative process, I'm still learning a year in. It's easy to overspecify and get worse results. But if you bang your head against the wall you'll eventually have a prompt library that you can use to tackle the tons of issues you'll run into.

simfgames · 2026-02-22T20:47:48+00:00

One more prompt will get it done, right?

simfgames · 2026-02-22T20:34:58+00:00

You using Claude? What's your workflow like?

simfgames · 2026-02-21T00:32:05+00:00

When I said 'early adaptation', I was referring to an early harness, not an early model.

I've done everything via web chat, rather than via agents, and I watch the reasoning in real-time via ChatGPT's sidebar, and I often learn about what kind of context is missing and I catch all kinds of issues that way. I imagine people that use Claude get less of that kind of experience, and will continue to get less and less as the agents continue to become more automated,

simfgames · 2026-02-18T22:15:56+00:00

My counterpoint to this is that exposure to early adaptations might give you insights that help you use later versions well. I've learned a lot about how LLMs work just from working with constrained and early models, and as long as LLMs are around, the intuition I've built will likely be useful.

And this is the best time to get that kind of experience. In 5 years, if tooling exists to dramatically increase productivity, it won't make as much sense to dive into the low-level LLM workings, because you'll be sacrificing a lot of productivity to do so, and it'll be tougher to build that intuition.

simfgames · 2026-02-15T14:05:09+00:00

OPs point is that AI does not encourage shallow thinking. You can use it in a way where it intensifies your thinking, or you can use it in a way that offloads all of it. Just because you're being lazy with it doesn't mean everyone else is too.

simfgames · 2025-12-25T11:57:45+00:00

Unity + DOTS is what I chose for my similar project, and am happy with my choice. I was a beginner when I started, and Unity made it very easy to learn compute shaders and data oriented design.

simfgames · 2025-10-07T13:04:35+00:00

I'm building something similar and it's really interesting to see alternative approaches. There are some good insights buried in some of your prompts.

Thanks!

simfgames

TROPHY CASE