Sector Siege needs improvement

Removing fog of war is not an option. It would enable the player to see every move the AI does, yet the AI can not see what you do (This would be a never ending task to code). The whole point of fog of war is to offer surprises and challenges. Remove this and the player is a god and the game is no challenge at all. The player would be able to counter every move the AI does with ease.

@Swiftyhorn. What you say is true, but the function of turrets would be fundamentally different. Regarding a unit, it would result in all turrets of one category shooting the same target. It does not work because the behavior is not what we want it to be. What you state about a perimeter is also a bit questionable. As far as I know it is not possible to tell the computer that it does not need to scan beyond 2000 range without looping through all objects anyway, the only way to do that is to compare all objects and leave out the ones beyond 2000 range. Well, we have now looped through all objects anyway and done at least one calculation.

The other way to do it is to use a overlap sphere and raycast. Now we can specify a range. Now, which one is more effective? That I do not know.

Removing fog of war is not an option. It would enable the player to see every move the AI does, yet the AI can not see what you do (This would be a never ending task to code). The whole point of fog of war is to offer surprises and challenges. Remove this and the player is a god and the game is no challenge at all. The player would be able to counter every move the AI does with ease.

@Swiftyhorn. What you say is true, but the function of turrets would be fundamentally different. Regarding a unit, it would result in all turrets of one category shooting the same target. It does not work because the behavior is not what we want it to be. What you state about a perimeter is also a bit questionable. As far as I know it is not possible to tell the computer that it does not need to scan beyond 2000 range without looping through all objects anyway, the only way to do that is to compare all objects and leave out the ones beyond 2000 range. Well, we have now looped through all objects anyway and done at least one calculation.

The other way to do it is to use a overlap sphere and raycast. Now we can specify a range. Now, which one is more effective? That I do not know.

Ray casting is better for sure. I was just assuming everything was on a grid already being monitored by the game on a global scale, if it’s not then my idea is pointless. With regards to all turrets of the same type firing, is it a huge problem, usually if we are in range all rockets are firing at the same target.

I was talking about making it an option to disable the fog but if the ai can't see you even with fog off then your right unfair player advantage and any performance benefit is lost to downgraded game play.

I like the independent targeting nature of the turrets and wouldn't want to compromise that. Its a hallmark of both this game and harbinger. Does the game hold the date in memory from each call for a while? Could this be what eating up processing power?

I have a question I've noticed that in playing harbinger that that game doesn't experience the same lag when dealing with similar amounts of fighters and ships as large battles in sector siege and I was wondering what the differences where in how the games handle the turret and fighter behavior? Also I was wondering if we could get the asteroid textures from harbinger ported to sector siege as I think they look better.

Well, fog of war for one. It plays a big part regarding performance since all human units will update it. Additionally Harbinger is limited to 3 human ships while sector siege can have up to 10, plus a bunch of fighters. Sector Siege has much more going on in a sector than Harbinger, capture points, enemies fighting each other, AI planning moves, Random event generation etc.

The game has been extensively optimized and analyzed to be able to support the unit counts it currently supports.

If you mean the asteroid belt backgrounds from Harbinger the answer is no unfortunately. Harbinger has a background generator that cannot be ported to the other engine without a lot of work. It would have to be coded again essentially. Sector Siege has its own and while it is not as pretty it is very cost efficient regarding performance.

Not the background but the actual rocks that hit the ships. The harbinger ones just look better and I was wondering if you could do a texture swap since they are functionally identical in how the interact with the ships.

Ahh, maybe.