Happy Trails
This entry was posted on Oct 13 2009 by Ben
So we were getting some performance issues from the boid trails. It turns out that updating, drawing, and tossing one trail particle per boid per frame into the garbage collector is inefficient at 150+ boids. Who knew?
Anyway, we adjusted the system to reduce the number of trail particles as the processor began to choke. This leads to the trails lengthening and shortening, gradually, during gameplay. As having a bunch of one kind of trail is cheaper than many different types of trail, this means that as you win, and more of the boids become your type, the trails get longer. It’s totally an intentional reward system.