I want to create a game but I have some questions regarding performance.
Game idea
Voxel 3D Tower Defense / RTS in which the player can control units to build structures and defend the base. (Inspired by this game)
Analysis
The voxel part seems pretty easy to manage. I saw that there is an existing voxel library made for godot, and that I could also implement it myself by just following a tutorial. One thing that I didn’t find a lot of information on is how I can either add slopes when the terrain is changing height, or how to tell the pathfinding algorithm that it can move up or down 1 block.
For the units, I read that a big issue with RTS games is the performance when trying to manage collisions and pathfinding. I think I can avoid that by limiting the amount of units the player can have, let’s say 15. So, by doing that, there should be no problem creating the units as CharacterBody3D, right? There would also be waves of enemies with the same node type, so during the combat/defense phase, there could be around 50 CharacterBody3D. Is that going to be an issue?
I saw online people ignoring collisions and having a simple 2D pathfinding algorithm to simplify things, but I don’t think that would work in my case since it’s not a pure RTS, it also has a base-building/physic aspect to it.
The next issue I’m concerned about is the building part. In the game I get my inspiration from, the units can place down blocks and create castles and fortresses. Ideally, each individual block would be a specific entity with physics applied so that a wall would be able to collapse if an enemy hits the bottom block and destroys it. I read that the RigidBody3D can have a heavy impact on performance because of its physics calculations. So I asked GPT and it said that the game could create the different blocks as StaticBody3D initially, and replace them with RigidBody3D when needed, but that sounded a little weird and I was wondering if there was a better solution. I know I can use a physics engine called Jolt that I hear is more optimized for those kinds of physics calculations.
Continuing with the building aspect, I would need to rebake the mesh every time a block is placed down. I saw that we can now bake meshes with the AABB feature, so instead of having multiple meshes to prevent rebaking all of it, I can simply rebake a small section.
This is all purely theoretical so far, I haven’t tested any of this. I just wanted to ask around and see if people had better ideas 