My game has enemy NPCs, and my current way of handling them is to connect a new heartbeat event everytime their target changes (for instance, when a player hits them they switch target to that player) and disconnect the old one. I am unsure if the way i’m handling them is going to become an issue once a big number of players are all fighting different NPCs.
One of the places of my game currently has reached over 70 NPCs, and will get more soon enough. Is my method fine as it is currently, or is there a better method? As I asked in the title: is it better the way I am currently using, or having one single connection that manages all the NPCs (i’d be using a table) would be better in terms of performance and lag?
Note that each NPC performs a new action every 0.1s, not every actual heartbeat. I use os.clock() and, in each heartbeat, I check if the last action was performed more than 0.1s ago (and in that case tell the NPC to execute a new action).
This is an example of how the code works currently:
for _, NPC in ipairs(workspace.NPCs:GetChildren()) do
local Target = NPC:WaitForChild("Target");
local Module = require(NPC.Actions);
local LastTarget = nil;
local Connection = nil;
Target.Changed:Connect(function(NewTarget)
if NewTarget == LastTarget then
return;
end;
if Connection ~= nil then
Connection:Disconnect();
end;
local Clock = os.clock();
Connection = RunService.Heartbeat:Connect(function()
if os.clock() - Clock >= 0.1 then
Clock = os.clock();
Module.Perform(NewTarget);
end;
end);
end);
end;
As you can see, a new connection is done singularly per NPC instead of using a single connection and manage all of them.
*Forgot to mention that the game isn’t out yet so I can’t test it on a large scale.