Reasonable Number of Actors/Factions

[samsungscreen]

Hi Tony,

I'm really liking Dialogue System and Quest System. And I'd like to integrate Love/Hate, too.

I'm building a large procedurally generated world, and I'd like to have roughly 500 unique actors/factions/faction members. All of the actors can offer procedurally generated quests, and some will be able to offer scripted quests. I'll likely cap the player at a max of 10 active quests.

All of the actors will occupy the same scene.

Is this reasonable from a memory and performance perspective? Or should I find a way to more efficiently simulate simulate actors and their relationships?

[Tony Li]

Sure, that's fine.

There's virtually no limit to the number of Love/Hate characters you can use. My test battery includes a scene with 10,000 Love/Hate characters.

The feature that uses the most CPU is procedural quest generation. But you're usually only generating one quest at a time, so it's hardly noticeable.

Procedurally-generated quests can also make saved game files bigger. In saved games, scripted quests only take a few bytes to save their states. But procedurally-generated quests needs to save all of their generated text, too. If you limit the player to 10 generated quests, it shouldn't be a problem at all.

Lots of scripted content (dialogue text, quest text, etc) will of course take more memory. But, being text, it's generally minor compared to the memory occupied by just a couple of image files. (This text isn't included in saved games either.)

[samsungscreen]

Thank you!

[Tony Li]

Happy to help!