At Least 10 Arachnids

[wooden ermine]

With thanks to Mee who has been exploring these sorts of techniques with me recently, I've been working on a kind of pseudo-instancing (https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.1/Documentation/Manual/GPUInstancing.html) recently.

There are up to 22,600 arachnids on screen here, with 3 LODs each with 16 separate meshes for each frame of the running animation.

Main lesson learned - the main bottleneck is cam.PushModelMatrix and where possible minimizing model changes (batching them together - so in my case, drawing all the LOD0 frame 1s in the same loop)

"Entities" are split randomly into 3 batches here just so they don't all have perfectly synchronized animations

For locomotion, exploring options at the moment. Main concern is finding the floor height. Thinking about taking the depth buffer from a high Z.

[pale sail]

Interesting 👍
What purpose do you want to use them for? Or is this just testing an idea?

[valid fable]

helldivers...

[wooden ermine]

My big thing is a Starship Troopers roleplay server I've ran for a decade or two

So ultimately, these guys will be used non-thinking (far away) arachnids, then become real NPCs when they get close

[pale sail]

Any thoughts on registering hits?

[wooden ermine]

octtree, maybe

do my own pseudotraces

https://wiki.facepunch.com/gmod/util.IntersectRayWithOBB

[pale sail]

Hope for more screenshots and info in the future. Good luck 👍

[fallen forge]

Nice job, I saw this and had a few questions, now that I got the time:

1 - How many NPCs are you pushing? That looks insane and amazing!

2 - Is that map infinitely large? It looks like there’s no end in sight! Nice job!!

3 - how accurate is the physics? This seems like a hefty load to network, how would this stack up with multiple players?

Not taking away from it, I just really wanted to know. Looks fantastic

[wooden ermine]

1. 22,600 there at peak

2. Nope but infmap compatible (working with Mee on a v2 - just convenient to have a quick loading map during dev)

3. I have a cache of trace results (voxelized to 32x32x64 units) but otherwise fire traces

4. Locomotion is ran in batches across a coroutine