Morkonan wrote: ↑Thu, 6. Dec 18, 00:22
Is there a danger of this dynamic economy using more resource value in terms of PC/CPU/etc than its actual play-value? (ie: I wonder about the impact of calcs going on in sectors the player has no interest in, yet.)
Without having looked at the actual code nor intending to do so, I would guess that the calculations not seen by the player are merely cost efficient counter variables.
There will be no path finding, no collisions, not even space at all... just some integer plus and minus operations on a data matrix synchronized by a very slow tick. Very hard to design but easy to calculate.
The CPU expensive part comes into play as soon as the player does want to see the data visualized in a nice and colorful universe map.
Then you have to pull data from the matrix and translate it into 3d coordinates to place a a symbol on the screen which does need to follow a certain path which has to be found first.
When the object enters the players 3d environment, the same coordinates from before are being used, but whatever you see in 3d will most likely have no impact at all on the universe calculation, unless you destroy or create something which is needed in further calculations.
So all in all I would guess a fake universe is calculated slightly quicker than a more suffisticated one. Moving ships on fake paths should be equally fast as moving them on real ones and destroying/creating things just results in different but not necessarily more complicated calculations on the underlying data.
Desining a datastructure to feel realistic and fun to play however is probably not easily done.
#atleastthatshowiwoulddoit
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