Ideas for new mechanics to improve performance

[pudapop]

Hey Klei team, 

I love ONI, great job with the design of the game. I don't know what the plans are for optimization, but I'm sure you are all aware of the issues facing late game bases and the frame drop. One idea that I think could help a ton is the "fog of war" that I've seen mentioned, but I've come up with two other ideas that I think could help the game's performance in late game.

1. Have mass storage available to players from the start that acts as a space vault. To elaborate, the storage would be located near the  printing pod but would hold the contents in a vacuum / space vault. This would keep the mass quantities of material from going through temp calculations and such.

2. A vacuum like device that Dupes could operate that would dispense of gasses to space. Unlike the storage vault, this would just be  a "delete key"  for large bodies of unwanted gases. I think for balancing it you would need to find a new type of waste / risk it would create so it can't be utilized to rid the base / power plants of C02. 

I'm not sure exactly how much these concepts would help, but I'm hopeful that the combination of the three could help the game's performance in late game. Currently, that is the main issue with my enjoyment of the game and is keeping me from playing it. Dropping to 6 FPS with my base is really not fun =[

[Daxterr]

The space vault would be cool. Everyone who's played this game knows that storage containers are annoying, and this would be a double whammy solution. I think it should be a research though.

[BlueLance]

9 hours ago, Daxterr said:

The space vault would be cool. Everyone who's played this game knows that storage containers are annoying, and this would be a double whammy solution. I think it should be a research though.

Atom Squisher - Squeezes atoms into less atoms!

Literally squishes everything into a compressed space. I would love that instead of 200+ containers...

[The Plum Gate]

Having a Tardis for a storage compactor would be interesting.

The problem with this is that like items stack - when they stack, a temperature calculation is performed to determine the resulting net temperature. (I've used this to normalize abyssalite temperatures actually ). I don't see how having a new storage compactor would avoid these calculations while somehow resulting in performance gains unless everything that goes into it gets set at a predetermined temperature (thus destroying or creating heat).

[Daxterr]

2 hours ago, The Plum Gate said:

Having a Tardis for a storage compactor would be interesting.

The problem with this is that like items stack - when they stack, a temperature calculation is performed to determine the resulting net temperature. (I've used this to normalize abyssalite temperatures actually ). I don't see how having a new storage compactor would avoid these calculations while somehow resulting in performance gains unless everything that goes into it gets set at a predetermined temperature (thus destroying or creating heat).

Everything inside the box would even out to the same temperature pretty quickly wouldn't it? And also  it's vacuum sealed so once the temperatures normalizes inside the box it could pretty much sit there forever without interacting with anything. At least I think that's the idea.

[AlexRou]

23 hours ago, pudapop said:

fog of war

If you meant RTS style fog of war that fades in/out depending on what areas are visible to units, this alone wouldn't make it any better, it would pretty much have no effect on the simulation. 

I think what you were thinking of is to scale the simulation such that things you are not staring at are done at a lower quality/fps. That is completely independent of a fog of war and and be implemented without any visual indication by simply doing it on whats out of the screen.

 

23 hours ago, pudapop said:

2. A vacuum like device that Dupes could operate that would dispense of gasses to space. Unlike the storage vault, this would just be  a "delete key"  for large bodies of unwanted gases. I think for balancing it you would need to find a new type of waste / risk it would create so it can't be utilized to rid the base / power plants of C02. 

Unless you make areas a completely vacuum, having N packets of gas will take up the same amount of resources/cpu no matter how much mass is in them. So you either have to make the pump OP or you would have to wait forever until you see any noticeable difference in FPS.

[pudapop]

1 hour ago, AlexRou said:

If you meant RTS style fog of war that fades in/out depending on what areas are visible to units, this alone wouldn't make it any better, it would pretty much have no effect on the simulation. 

 

Even if the fog would stop any calculations being made?

[AlexRou]

7 minutes ago, pudapop said:

Even if the fog would stop any calculations being made?

fog alone does not stop any calculations, everything would still be running. The only thing it does is stop you from seeing it so the only thing it would affect is the display time and that is the least of your worries compared to the simulation time.