Hi
I am in the process of building a space game which I would like to get some feedback / tips from the Away crew and the community regarding the following:
1. Performance optimisation
2. Complex path animation of 100s of 3D models
3. Complex path animation
4. Best way to animate
5. Physics / Collisions
Other than the basics of low polly, small textures etc, my ideas so far are:
1. Fix the skybox flicker issue (done by reducing camera.len.far value - but may need the larger values thus restoring the bug)
2. Work out how to animate 100s of models along a path and check for collision (box collision accuracy is fine and to then calculate alternate path). Orbit, move to etc. Anyone got any tips here? Is it possible to get the GPU to animate and handle these calculations?
2. I am needing 100s of ships on the scene at any one time that ships smaller than a certain scale / visible size they would be removeChild from scene and replaced with a sprite or particle or something? Recommendations?
3. Physics. I am only needing basic collision processing so I’m thinking bounding box calculations may be good for this. But I also need to calculate path, thrust, gravitational pull and frictional forces. Now this is where I go, eeek! Huston we have a problem! So.. Any recommendations as to how I can handle this also and apply it to 100s of objects on the scene also, which affect their paths and trajectory animations?
4. Shield impact animations - I’m not quite sure how I would generate a spherical / eliptical shape (does it even need to be in 3D?) and to animate an impact on the shield at the general position of impact.
5. Explosions - I assume this would be a sprite sheet animation? or some sort of stacking effect generated with planes, semi transparent textures and scaling for various size explosions etc? Recommendations?
6. AI - I have a good idea on how to program the AI but if I am processing an ever growing set of variables and tasks (which are not visible) in an ever growing universal state machine. How best to handle this? I have a procedural AI for condition testing and actions resulting. So if I have a potential 5,000 to 10,000 calculations of AI state per a solar system and I have 100 solar systems. We talking too much for flash here? Certain AI tasks are on interval checking so it’s not critical performance however combat AI system is performance critical.
Any and all feedback is welcome.
Thanks
Darcey
