ok so im making an ant simulator currently and i dont want to make a for loop for every ant so i want a better way on going through the overlapping bodies without going through a for loop to save performance, there will be about 5 to 20 bodies every time so is there a better way than going through every one of them
#Godot 4.6 Question about a better way of getting the biggest or the smallest of an int array
mellow blade
misty robinBOT
carmine blade
You would want to first use this one tho: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_array.html#class-array-method-map
get your array of ants. Then map them into an array of distance SQUARED to your target point. Then use either min or max on that array.
and use that index to select the right ant.
Well, max and min wil give you the VALUE. You'll need extra work to get the index
Both finding the min/max and then finding the index of that value add up to be O(2n), which scales all right especially if you let the C++ do the work for you
Technically O(3n) if you count mapping the ants to distances squared.
Still workable
However, it's workable if only a few units are doing this loop every frame, or if they are staggered (one frame, group A gets to tick, next frame, Group B ticks) though that can be a bit cursed
Truthfully, what you've stumbled upon is a non-trivial problem.
If all ants have to tick at the once, and check every other ant, you run into O(n^2) which does not scale at all.
If all ants MUST tick every frame, then you have to get into spatial data structures
The simplest example being, you divide the world into squares, and use those squares as "buckets" to put the ants in, and an ant only checks ants that are 1 or 2 squares away instead of every ant on the map.
Basically it is a cheap low-pass filter that filters out ants that are absolutely not in range first.