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by SotCodeLaureate 1411 days ago
> at least tens of thousands of simulated AI agents

Are you planning on displaying all/most of them every frame, or just to control that many of them, then draw those nearby/visible?

If it's the former (but how exactly?) then perhaps Vk is the way to go, if the latter, then it's hard to see how Vulkan vs OpenGL is all that relevant here.
2 comments
cyber_kinetist 1411 days ago
Many of the enemy entities (which I’m expecting to be around the ten-thousands in the late portions of the game) are going to be visible on-screen, since most of them are going to be flying above the ground and only the terrain is going to hide them (no big architectural structures on the map obstructing them). And I would like to create lighting effects when they explode, which would require huge lighting counts.

The AI for the flying enemies isn’t going to be too complex, it will probably going to be some variation of boid simulation. However I still expect this to be computationally intensive, particularly when it comes to querying nearby entities and terrain. I am expecting some of the expensive geometric querying can be moved to the GPU via compute shaders.

The reason for using Vulkan instead of OpenGL was more of a pragmatic one: I’ve heard that OpenGL drivers can be hilariously bad on Windows, when it comes to both conformance and performance. Vulkan seems to be better in that respect, since both Nvidia and Amd has incentive to develop decent enough Vulkan drivers since some high-profile AAA games use it. Also, it is a pain in the ass to debug issues in OpenGL, and Vulkan is at least better than that.

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TillE 1411 days ago
Right, there's no reason to discard a game engine just because its most common usage patterns are inappropriate to your needs. Even if you do need to draw a zillion objects on screen, any engine will let you create your own mesh and feed that to the renderer.
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robotnikman 1411 days ago
IIRC the game From the Depths does this, being a game where you create ships using thousands of voxels. Using gameobjects for everything just would not have worked
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