So the big news is that by using the negative half of the vector floats we, gretman, have managed to double the max dimensions of the map. 4x the volume. This is still being tested but it's looking good.
The truly epic map setting has been brought back. This is a very big map. To get an idea. Take the current epic map. Shrink the top left corner to the center of the map and fill the empty space with stars.
Well not that many stars but close. The main issue with big maps is memory. That and performance as that extra stuff uses more resources and also allows the ai to expand more resulting in less memory available and more memory needed.
Even though we have been able to free up a lot of memory it may not be enough.
Pathing. Stardrive pathfinding had always been the stuff of legend. Maybe not good legend though. So the current pathing had been swapped out with an a* algorithm which is an industry standard in pathfinding. This works OK. It's still not as good as I would like but it can stick tight to roads and still utilize them when there is no road to target. It also uses a caching mechanism so that when it finds a path it stores it making the next ship that wants this path to be able to look it up rather than recreate it
About the truly epic map setting, is the memory issue on the game engine or on our end?
I would also ask what the new requirements to run this mod would be with beast settings. I mean maxing out everything like unlimited ships everywhere in epic maps. I'm fixing to upgrade since my last PC finally died recently.
well we dont know yet.
i know that i was able to run on the truly epic mode with automation for 12 hours getting to 5k ships. The performance was pretty bad though.
how it will behave with user interaction i dont know.
I have since this build released decreased the CPU usage needed and that may make a difference when we move the map changes from experimental to test.