How do I optimize server side NPC movement for an RPG (Massive amount of enemies)

[Dfzoz]

1. What do you want to achieve?
   I am creating an enemy AI system, which has a simple command: attack if near, else follow the player, via pathfind or direct follow.
   I am trying to prevent lag in the server already, removing unnecessary things for the server to handle, like the npc model and animation.

2. What is the issue?
   I don’t know what approach to use in order to move the enemy in the server side. Is humanoid:MoveTo() bad in this case?
   How do I check if an NPC movement is possible elsewhere? Raycasts seem like it will allow possible noclips from the NPCs, and Shapecast looks too expensive to be constantly used.
   Should I use CFrame? Won’t there be a possible noclip from the enemies?
   What about bodymovers? Won’t they lag as much as humanoids?

[DataSigh]

Atrazine made a post about how he handled that in his game. It’s a really good resource

How we reduced bandwidth usage by 60x in Astro Force (Roblox RTS)

[image] Summary Hello! This is a summary of some of the bandwidth optimizations we made in Astro Force, our Roblox Accelerator project (link here)! Astro Force is a real-time strategy (RTS) game @loravocado and I are working on, and the goal is to have a system efficient enough to handle hundreds of independent units. While a lot of these bandwidth optimizations are very specific to our game, I thought it’d still be cool to share what we did! This is also my first time doing bandwidth optim…

[poopgamer36522 (Extraoton)]

AnimationControllers and models run on the client, server used just for bare raw data, I suppose using cframe lerping + raycasts is the way to go uf you are looking to accomplish something like this:

This is not a real enemy...

[Dfzoz]

Okay, that seems to work great! Remade some of the code for this and the script Activity/Rate seems to have went from 1.4%/30.0s to .2*/6.0s. Probably needs more optimizations, but it’s already a great step.