NPC Logic on Client vs Server

[Downrest (Down)]

If you’re adamant to sticking with humanoids, you can try disabling HumanoidStates that you wouldn’t necessarily need.

Disabling humanoid states questions

I’ve dealt with this problem before. I found that the Freefall humanoid state creates the most lag, and if you aren’t in need of your AI walking on multiple different Y coordinates you wont really notice a difference without it. I have tested this with around 50 AI with the following humanoid states listed below disabled on the server but it definitely wasn’t ideal. If you are in need of 100-200 AI at once I would not at all recommend using humanoids to begin with. Body movers would be much more…

You can also attempt to hide your NPCs whenever they’re too far, keep in mind that occlusion culling is a thing.

..nevermind, occlusion culling currently doesn’t work for avatars (which I’m assuming means humanoids)

@ProgramDude

Limitations

This initial release has some limitations:

• Avatars and terrain aren’t occluded and cannot occlude
• Lights, VFX and UI are not occluded
• Shadows and shadow casters are not occluded
• Highly detailed meshes or parts that are small on the screen will not be used to occlude other objects.

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However, there is another method that is commonly used for real-time strategy (RTS) games that involve a buuunch of units – it’s where you ditch serversided humanoids, and instead opt to have the server…

• figure out the positions of each NPC (and their pathfinding)
  – you can look into modules like FastFlow which use the concept of “flowfields” to avoid pathfinding for each individual NPCs
• send this position data to clients
  – be smart about how often you send data, “too frequent” can be really laggy – especially with a ton of NPCs. You can look into modules like BridgeNet2 or ByteNet which can really lessen your bandwidth

and the client..

• render the NPCs and handle all the magic (animations, sounds, etc.)
  – since you’d be loading animations on the client, you can also look into workspace.ClientAnimatorThrottling which throttles animations depending on their distance

There are a ton of genuinely helpful resources for this method, definitely look into these:

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