Minimun ammount of bullets/Collision entities

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Thelaes21
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Minimun ammount of bullets/Collision entities

Post by Thelaes21 »

What is the minimum amount of entities with collision enabled my bullethell game should handle?

I was watching a video about how with the standard bullet generator code in the godot engine can handle 1000 bullets before a drop in framerate. So for a bullethell counting the player's bullets how many is the minimum amount in the average cave game approximately? maybe 3000? I think Im paying too much attention to the enemy generated bullets but not the player's.

What do you think?
Ixmucane2
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Re: Minimun ammount of bullets/Collision entities

Post by Ixmucane2 »

  • On a modern PC, struggling at 1000 bullets is between pathetic and mediocre; probably, the Godot engine experiment you cite is not very optimized and/or spends time on something other than bullets, so you can probably treat this number as a rarely approached lower limit.
  • You can approximately substitute many easy bullets with few difficult bullets (compare e.g. the first level of Dodonpachi and Raiden, with somewhat similar scenery and enemies); there are no thresholds, the difference between intense dodging and looking at the pretty curtain fire is more important than how much you fill the screen.
It might be more productive to measure how many bullets your game engine can handle and treat it as a budget; when it isn't enough, optimize something or replace less necessary content.
pieslice
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Re: Minimun ammount of bullets/Collision entities

Post by pieslice »

Dodonpachi has a hard limit of 270 enemy bullets on screen at once.
Newer cave titles will most likely have more - around 500 to 1000 I'd reckon.

You should keep the player and enemy bullets in different lists; if you do not have terrain collision (such as in rsg or ikaruga) you only need to do a simple AABB check in enemy bullet vs the player hitbox.

Player bullets need to iterate all enemy colliders so they require much more processing. Also the player bullets vs. enemy could be more accurate since player bullets often move so fast that they need more accurate collision detection than just aabb interections.
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Sumez
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Re: Minimun ammount of bullets/Collision entities

Post by Sumez »

pieslice wrote:Dodonpachi has a hard limit of 270 enemy bullets on screen at once.
Newer cave titles will most likely have more - around 500 to 1000 I'd reckon.
Also worth noting that most Cave games hit a "drop in framerate" well before they hit their practical maximum bullet count. :P
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