Sounds like fun, and the issue of people surviving through exploits could be easily dealt with by just forcefully kicking and killing everyone when the maintenance actually starts, saying that the planet got Exterminatus'd or something.
This sounds AWESOME, so many memorable moments could happen. But spawning these amount NPCs might cause some laggs.
I feel like there ought to be several ways to combat the NPCs causing lagg. If there was a way to only spawn the Tyranids where there are players that would work. Also, this sudden invasion would need to be so devastating that hundreds of people are killed almost instantly and not allowed to respawn so that, in my mind, would drastically reduce the amount of load on the server. However you slice it I think there are plenty of ways to reduce lagg for this.
Instead of spawning as many Tyranids as there are players, would it not be possible to spawn constant waves of Tyranids?
No matter how I twist this - atm we are just unsure if we will have Nids in the open world, so achieving this is a very different technical problem. Just so you guys understand what we are talking about: - every Nid from network perspective is a full player - having enough Nids in total to wipe out the whole population basically instantly is also putting a huge amount to AI "calculations", just imagine that you have to calculate for every player that needs to be "reached" by every Nid - "the path to run up to the player" - and that at the same time. (pathfinding) - showing the Nids on the client side would basically instantly double the amount of characters shown on screen There is a lot of ways how to tweak and make this somehow happening - all sorts of optimizations, reduction of view distance, split up calculations of CPUs and machines etc... Don't get me wrong, given enough time, there is a solution for this, but when looking from project management point of view we are talking about a whole lot of work for programmers and designers, for a feature that not every one will ever see, that is basically just masking the way we bring down the servers. Not sure I can justify the cost of this vs adding some better polish or gameplay elements that more players benefit from long term.
I couldn't agree more. I am excited about even the possibility of this idea making it in game but if it doesn't I won't mind it one bit. Given the choice between having this in game in some form or other things that we will be interacting with on a constant basis I will have to go with the second. Keep up the good work!
What if the nids didn't appear everywhere at once? If they spawned at one area at a time the load would be drastically reduced. They would probably have to start appearing sooner in order to have the time to kill off all the players though. After wiping out a vast majority of the players by swarming the areas one at a time there could be a new wave to hunt down the few survivors individually.
