From The Depths - Forum

Full Version: Fast despawning
currently when something dies in the game it has a despawning mechanic where once the countdown timer hits 0 blocks will start being rapidly destroyed one by one. This makes for a cool looking animation but it's also by far the biggest performance hit that I have while playing. It is fine for smaller ships but for bigger ships the countdown will often get to -1 minute and the whole time my game will have slowed to the point that the 1 minute that the countdown has taken is closer to 3 or 4 minutes in real life. This is especially annoying when I have finished the battle but I can't do anything for 3 or 4 minutes while i'm waiting for the last enemy to despawn. So I propose Nick adds an option to simply delete the entire vehicle after a certain amount of time. So if you set this option to no limit the vehicle will continue to despawn as they do now but if you set it to something like 5 seconds then if the countdown gets to -5 second the entire vehicle will be destroyed instantly in the same way that it would be if you used the destroy a vehicles option within the vehicle designer.
Aye aye captain you da boyz gud on dis one.
The 'destroy all vehicles' option in the destroyer deletes the vehicles entirely, instead of destroying them, which doesn't leave scavengeable resources behind.

If the vehicle was taken out of play and then scrapped, it does leave it's post-death resources behind. So all you'd need to do is have an option to pull vehicles being scrapped out of play after a certain limit.
I've made a similar suggestion to this in a request-o-matic (an option to not have the blackened block dying animation so that "dead" block are just deleted) and I support this.
I was playing FtD on a laptop with no AC today and on battery saving mode I could still have cruiser sized battles without lag. But as soon as the slow despawn thing started for each downed enemy, it would start to lag.

I will not mind if the despawning could be made a little more efficient on computational resources.
Yep, I also suggested that before. Please make it happen.

I have not the worst rig and anyways get horrible lag when destroyed enemies start to decay.
The fix should not be hard imo? Just mark the vehicle as "this this thing is dead", and when that flag is on -- do not recalculate things upon block change (which is what I assume is happening).