I started to experiment with the ghost shooter demo and RTS object to try and figure out the best way to move my large groups of enemies.
enemies are really simple,slow and small (only about 32x32 or so), and they need to only know where the player is and how to get to him. So obviously i encountered performance issues, since im using alot of enemies. about over a 100-150 (i really want to try and push the envelope here, so its prob going to increase)on screen at once. first tests tanked my cpu when i put all the enemies constantly trying to find player location. i realize this isnt the proper way of doing it. second, i tried something like trigger once and everything was smooth. but this raised a new problem:
what if the player moves and changes the position?
that raised alot of questions again. i started thinking that maybe i could find something really simple, not cpu intensive pathfinding.
i came up with the idea to make a single dummy object for a large group of enemies, make the dummy handle its way to the player by using RTS object and make the enemies as simple, rough physics objects, constantly adding force to the dummy objects position and when they are close enough and have line of sight to player, add force towards him instead.
i havent tried this(or any other alternative) yet, and i wanted to ask if anyone else have been struggling with a large number of AI pathfinding or is the RTS object pretty much the way to go? or perhaps someone has even found a great cost effective solution?
i know physics object is cpu intensive too, but it sounds tempting cause it gives great collision options and reaction to force and such.
i could really use any kind of guiding on this matter.
thanks.