Multiplayer Performance

In order to try the game with larger player counts, the new multiplayer update adds a four player map. This map is large, open and broad. My general idea was to see what it was like to play on a more open map that had more to see.

I bumped into quite a few problems while building this. The main one was performance. Because this game is so oddly scaled, such that the player is a giant walking around a minature landscape, there are quite a lot of things being rendered at once. 

While the terrain itself performed well, large forests and wheat fields drained the player's FPS during testing. This makes sense, considering I took trees meant to be viewed up close by a player half their height, and then simply shrunk them to the scale I'm working with. The solution was to add LOD components such that trees rendered any meaningful distance away were cut down in detail. Again, very important considering the odd scale that the game presents the world in.

That said, I'm stilling doing battle with performance issues related to having lots and lots of units in the game at once. Specifically, guests in a host's game will find frame drops when there are several hundred units in game, particularly when they are on screen. This is the result of the client receiving and interpolating the position of hundreds of networked gameobjects each frame.

My temporary solution has so far to be to slow down unit recruitment and balance the game against huge armies, but eventually I will need a more sophisticated solution.