Spring RTS Engine

I was listening to npr today and heard a novel technique used by certain animals to sleep. They turn off half their brain and keep the other alert enough to detect predators. The trait allows mammals like dolphins and whales to sleep while concienciously breathing. It even was present in group behaviors with ducks sitting in rows and the ones on the end half slept while the ones in the center of the rows got a full unadulterated sleep cycle.

Basically would it be prudent to strategically deaden the refresh of sensors on units that are basically static? If a unit is out in the middle of nowhere and its not around another sole unit, perhaps it would be prudent to only refreshen its sight, radar, sonar, and seismic circles of detection less often? Maybe even simply to rotate which sensor type is ignored every other long unit update cycle. Another idea could be when units are in a group together they don't use their sensors when their entire sensor area is overlapped by surrounding units.

Wouldn't stuff like this help game speed as maps increase in size and a player's unit count reaches his unit limit?

You know, that idea isn't half bad. However, wouldn't the engine need to determine that such a state was prudent, thus requiring other calculations?

The more I think about it, the more it appeals to me. Sneaking up on infantry in 1944, allowing a light unit rush to get in range before the defenses came on line...

Flesh it out, amigo, you may be on to something.

Rat, the circles in LOS view are purely graphical (for the gameplay effect it calculates way more often). I don't think you can increase performance by skipping them for a refresh since you wouldn't know which pixels of the old view to keep so you'd either skip drawing the unit's sensors or have to redraw it anyway. As for increasing the poll interval for the unit's sensor detection I'm not sure if that'd do anything, Spring already splits the map into sectors and only checks distance to units that are in sectors the sensor even reaches, any check on whether nothing is near would have to be based on what is in what sector (unless you decide to skip that prudence test completely for skipped calculations). Also keep in mind that what one mod considers long range can be next door in another, e.g. the "hold position" widget that makes longrange units hold position defaults to 300 as long range, in something like Gundam the only weapons below 300 range are pretty much melee, even shortranged machineguns have 450.

neddie: That would be better done by giving defenses an "unfold" animation.

So if no non-aligned units are in a sector it doesn't scan, too? I'm just proposing a way to minimize some sensor scans.

Since the scan consists of comparing distances and line of sight with all enemy units in the sector a sector without enemies won't cause any scans anyway.