Giant Maps

[ProfZelonka]

What's the bottleneck of using giant maps, exactly?

Let's pretend I'm a rich guy who could build a super computer, what component super-upgrade would remove the bottleneck of slow gameplay on (impractical) giant maps?

[Canute]

The old bottleneck was the memory of the 32bit rimworld that prevent large maps on large worlds with many mods.
But with the 64 bit rimworld that has gone.
Next bottleneck is the CPU, since Rimworld is mainly about data managment,calculations a faster CPU helps more then more core's at the current state of Rimworld.
And large map's don't say anything about how big you would like to have your colony. Pawn's which seek work/food/social/pathing, Animals that need food,hauling.
Don't forget anything at the map need to be calculated even when you can't see it. Other games with large map's only calculate the visible and a small area around, ok but most of these have giant/opensize maps.

GPU isn't that important, the grafic isn't A+ anyway.

[Whifflepits]

CPU and ram speed, and decreasing the latency between the two.

Like any other game with an older engine, you just need to brute force it with pure speed.

[ProfZelonka]

Thanks guys, that makes sense.

I'm running an i7-4790K @ stock 4.00GHz with probably about 40-100 mods with 32gb ram. I noticed that if I load an insanely large (1000x1000) map, even at the beginning of the game with 3 people, the gameplay is way too slow to be playable. The graphics and world almost seems to move faster than the 3 colonists during simple haul jobs. No camera movement lag when paused of course. Should also note that map generation took like 30mins. What I found interesting is that my RAM usage didn't really go up on a map that size.. Even CPU usage, maybe up 10%-15%. I'm not seeing the CPU or any component usage go up beyond about maybe 30%.

In conclusion it makes a lot of sense that it's very heavy on CPU speed (possibly single core), and nothing else *really* matters when it comes to computers that aren't entirely old. It even sounds like it could heavily be optimized, regardless of whether it'd be hard to do or not.

[Topper]

My understanding is the big maps break resource balance and inhibit the AI attacks by giving the player tons of time to prepare and even move things.

[Canute]

Basicly you can have 2-4 colonies on such super large maps, logistic and zone managment are more important when it take a day to move from one side to another.
Not to speak about raiders, many could be exhaused before they even can fire a bullet.

Unless you want play a peaceful colony simulation, i wouldn't recommend such super large maps. Better create a second colony at a different position.

[ProfZelonka]

Well, personally, I play RimWorld as a base building sim. While raiders getting tired isn't my problem, colonists walking for hours definitely would be. I guess I just don't like borders. lol

Maybe in Rimworld 2, or possibly a whole other game since I doubt it'd be possible as just a mod, there can be an open "endless" map with a "far-enough" line of site. "Fog of war" but further site around the base and no "real" end to the map - it'd have to be a trick really, where events and things happen slightly outside the line of sight and somehow the map would be auto generated the further you go.