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I’d say Tuitti has it largely correct.
Moreover, think about what “simplified pathfinding” that just goes towards the player without a brain would actually look like. The zombies would walk until they reach the first tree, boulder, or fence in their path and then… well then nothing, because you didn’t give them the smarts to grasp that there’s something in the way or how to go around. It would look immensely stupid, and even if users could overlook that instead of reporting it as a bug every day… I argue players still wouldn’t want it anyway.
Whatever you want to say about the pathing the zombies use, it’s efficient - the best algorithm (A* search) computer science has come up with, going back decades, when you can’t pre-process the world. Any other pathing they could do would take longer. That in turn means zombies would on average hang around longer, taking longer before they’re in range of your weapons or you’re in range of their attacks. Which is poison if you actually want to engage with as many zombies at once as you can.
While these dumb zombies are taking their sweet time getting to you instead of taking the optimal path, they’re each occupying one of the slots that counts towards your max zombie count. During the time they’re not yet engaging with you, they’re still tying up system resources. At best, these dumb zombies puttering around in the distance but not having a meaningful effect on gameplay would give the ambiance of a bigger zombie horde. They could paint a horde of zombies onto the skybox too, and you’d see them in the background looking scary, without the performance cost. 😉
Originally posted by Antearz: As for CPU and GPU.It’s not a good comparison. Give an example of hundreds of enemies on screen in a 100% destructible voxel world, where any one of those enemies can destroy any part of the world at any time, with potentially significant consequences to e.g. AI pathing and structural integrity calculations.
No Offense. But anyone who Played Games like Darktide etc.
Knows that You can have Hundreds of Enemies on Screen with no such Issues.
And since the Additional Zombies are just Normal Ones. They dont really Produce any Effects or such. So the GPU is really not challenged by this.On this, I agree. The game is more CPU bound than GPU bound.
The Biggest Drag would be Pathfinding.
But this can be Fixed by simply giving the Additional Normal Zeds a Simplified Pathfinding which causes them to not look for Paths and just go towards the Player without a Brain.People often make this argument, especially those that want dumber zombies anyway. I don’t buy it. For one thing, as I understand it there’s only one pathing grid. There’s only one ‘brain’ that knows how to navigate the world, and every zombie asks that brain how to get from their personal point A to B. So what actually gets taxing is the number of requests for directions. Making the same or more requests but splitting them between a ‘smart’ brain and a ‘dumb’ brain when the same hardware runs both brains probably doesn’t help much.
Moreover, think about what “simplified pathfinding” that just goes towards the player without a brain would actually look like. The zombies would walk until they reach the first tree, boulder, or fence in their path and then… well then nothing, because you didn’t give them the smarts to grasp that there’s something in the way or how to go around. It would look immensely stupid, and even if users could overlook that instead of reporting it as a bug every day… I argue players still wouldn’t want it anyway.
Whatever you want to say about the pathing the zombies use, it’s efficient - the best algorithm (A* search) computer science has come up with, going back decades, when you can’t pre-process the world. Any other pathing they could do would take longer. That in turn means zombies would on average hang around longer, taking longer before they’re in range of your weapons or you’re in range of their attacks. Which is poison if you actually want to engage with as many zombies at once as you can.
While these dumb zombies are taking their sweet time getting to you instead of taking the optimal path, they’re each occupying one of the slots that counts towards your max zombie count. During the time they’re not yet engaging with you, they’re still tying up system resources. At best, these dumb zombies puttering around in the distance but not having a meaningful effect on gameplay would give the ambiance of a bigger zombie horde. They could paint a horde of zombies onto the skybox too, and you’d see them in the background looking scary, without the performance cost. 😉