Current Version of Freeplay Review

Thank you for all your hard work on this game. Here are a few issues I'm encountering in Freeplay;

1. lady bugs seem to march in a line from a gathering spot in which they will stack on top of each other and freeze there

2. there seems to be a problem once you get to around 1000 ants, the food gathering system seems to shut down. massive amounts of ants get stuck at the entrance of the nest, which I'm assuming are blocking anybody from getting in with food (edit: I just realized this may be because I put all the food tiles at the entrance like I always do, but ive never seen it like this. they seem to be just stalled there)

3. at around 1000 ants, the game becomes an unplayable slideshow. not sure if this is a hardware problem or its happening for everybody. my specs are 16GB RAM, GTX 1070 w/ 8GB VRAM, i7-7700 intel processor, i remember seeing about 5 FPS at that point

4. at around 1000 ants (again), many ants will get lost very far away from the pheromone marker and just sit there. this might be because I had them all in one control group, but it was too laggy for me to try splitting them up or even moving them at that point

5. uber creatures dead bodies disappear before you can gather the entire corpse

6. at around 1000 ants, i can no longer hold down the alt key to see healthbars and during this time they will randomly blink on and off on their own. probably because of the low FPS but not sure

i posted a link to a video i recorded showing these things. thank you again for the work and effort being put into the game!

https://vimeo.com/266913292
 

MikeSlugDisco

Community Manager
Staff member
Community Manager
1) Some work to be done there, clearly. Will see if I can reproduce that.

2) It sounds like at this point the pathing systems and everything get jammed - there's lots of optimizations we can do here in the future, but it is nice to see people pushing the limits of things.

3) You have a very similarly-specced system to my own. The bottleneck, I believe, is not graphical but CPU. Unlike a typical RTS where units are pretty much "go here, shoot this" levels the ants have a rather complex brain behind them. Again, optimizations to be done and we appreciate seeing the limits pushed.

4) As above. The 1000 ants is a consistent theme here!

5) Yep, have heard this one from several people. We'll be adjusting that.

6) As above...

Thanks for the reports. The stretching of the limits is actually really useful in seeing where we could do with making things more efficient!
 
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