Suggested Feature: Virtualization for various types of static object compositions #825
Description
This mainly (in case I forgot any) applies to the following types of static object compositions or empty vehicles:
- Random Camps
- Military Objective Supplies
- Assymetric Facilities
- Roadblocks
- Field HQ
- IED Threat Module (Partially implemented)
- Ambient Civilian/Military Vehicles (possibly)
While I have noticed that while ALiVE has amazing features that allow it to achieve great performance even on absurdly massive scenarios through either virtualization or dynamically spawning of assets.
However I also recently noticed that the random camps, roadblocks, supplies, facilities, ambient empty VBIED vehicles, and field HQs are curiously absent from this this treatment being forced to spawn at the start of the mission, which has a massive risk of degrading the performance specially with large maps/TAORs having so many objects sitting around.
I do believe that this should be possible to avoid through virtualization of the compositions, and have the compositions only spawn once a player is close enough to it (in the case of supplies, facilities and other compositions within objectives they could be "grouped" to their objectives, so that there only needs to be one check for several compositions).
However almost as important would be their CLEANUP/re-virtualization, which would be necessary in order to avoid having many compositions sitting "abandoned".
And this cleanup/re-virtualization behavior could perhaps even be extended to the IED Threat module (which already only spawns IEDs and clutter once there is a player nearby), so that "abandoned IEDs" and specially the empty VBIED vehicles don't just sit around taking up precious resources. I do not recall right now if the Civilian and Military ambient vehicles are virtualized or not, as I do not use them.