Hi.
If this post gets answered, I hope it will also help anyone else trying to hit that combination of “instance/teams/performance”, so I hope I'm forgiven for writing a novel like this one.
Also, if by some miracle this does work in the end, I might repay it by some tutorial or at least a post reply about what tips it gave me.
I have asked and received great advice for a small scale strategy game, but thou it has helped with many details, I think I just can't finish it without this topic:
Is there either a smart object universally compatible or some magical combination of distinct player units/instances without copies/performance, which would allow me to reach 3000 or 4000 active objects without frame rate dropping under something acceptable like 30 fps? I know Fusion can have even 10000 units in there as long as they do nothing but move around, but I was hoping to get to at least 3000 with a reserve for resources, bullets and such.
First the good news: I have received help and have some code to allow instances to attack each other without copies (like “soldier01”, “soldier02”), and I have animated simple soldier units, which have frames for two units, three and so on, to blow up the unit count even more. Also, I use automated rotation with top-down view, so I presume animation stress should be as low as possible? However, I for the life of me can't figure out how to make both instances with team colors and at the same time be able to animate them bolster the unit numbers, since:
- using loops to attach a colored circle or anything visible to make teams stand out starts to lag the Fusion around 1000 – 1500 units (and means 500 soldiers would also mean 500 markers), without loops the attaching with build-in spawning and such don't seem to work without bugs and trying to use attached counters with color circle animation doesn't seem to be less lagging than active objects
- without any attached markers, animating instances to both have frames for unit count and color or other difference for teams would mean… countless animation frames within any instance to work? I know I could make animation “brown” with frames “0 = one soldier” “1 = two soldiers”, but if I want them to have even two or three different stances (arrow, line or a circle) it starts to be hundreds of frames per animation, and I don't know if the Fusion can handle that all, or me...
- I was hoping the main teams to be brown and grey, with possibly red and blue to be “support” teams if needed and possibly green or something for neutral. I tried to avoid markers and animating altogether by making alterable value for team to event a rgb change, but I just can't get all the necessary colors to come out like that. Changing color affects all the instances, so that won't help, but maybe rgb effect could, if I was able to make it work…
- I have tried to use fixed values to link the soldiers/soldier group to an object called “group”, which I can just set to a color by “value = set frame”, but making units/groups to follow and look at the “group”- objects without bugs means loops, and it seems to cause same kind of resources cap as attaching a colored marker would too…
So, if anyone bothered to read this much jargon, I think I ask the following:
1. Is there a way to attach markers to units, that won't lag as soon as you hit 500 units + 500 markers?
2. Is there a way to get brown, grey, red, blue and green colors out of rgb effect? Does it need smart objects or some calculation beyond “GetRGB (red, green, blue)” to work?
3. Is there a tutorial or some clever way to create a group of soldiers, make them follow a “group”- object and still be able to attack individually? (Making the group objects to fight each other looks silly, if soldier units get left behind and die miles away from the main group)
4. Is there any alternative to make a few teams of swarm like armies, while one instance can be both a game unit for different teams and still visibly apart from the other teams?
5. Is my only option to make copies of every units for every team? I'll do it, if it's the only way, but not until it is the only way to do it. Handling something like sounds taunting.
Or am I just embarrassing myself and I need to buy an editor able to make an rts game? I have tried to avoid it, since I have done at least something viable with Fusion before and I don't have coding diploma to back me up, but... 