Pavonis Interactive Forums

I was wondering with all these lovely mods mentioning custom pathing & hardcoded concealment, if the benefit of having this hardcoded in native code brings enough performance benefit to outweight the work & slowdown by having mod authors redoing it themselfes.
I have seen it being mentioned in Comments:
- Gotcha Again
- Peek from Concealment
- True Concealment
- Perfect Information
- Tactical Surpressors

sentinel wrote:I was wondering with all these lovely mods mentioning custom pathing & hardcoded concealment, if the benefit of having this hardcoded in native code brings enough performance benefit to outweight the work & slowdown by having mod authors redoing it themselfes.
I have seen it being mentioned in Comments:
- Gotcha Again
- Peek from Concealment
- True Concealment
- Perfect Information
- Tactical Surpressors

I thought -- though I could be wrong -- that the problem was that it was in a section of code that only one mod can replace; therefore, changing it would make the mod incompatible with any other mod that made changes to it, such as LW2.

Why do people have to create their own version though? Isn't that something worth having a global function they could all connect with?

I cannot speak for mods other than Gotcha Again, but the reason I use a custom system for creating pathing indicators is so I can avoid having the default system place an indicator somewhere where I need to place one of the custom ones I'm implementing and have things look weird.

Instead I take care of all types of indicators myself so I can properly combine them into one indicator if several are needed at the same tile.

You are mixing two problems together here though:
-Modifying XComGame objects, which is possible, but only 1 mod can do it.
-Native code, which is code that is not visible or modifyable to modders. The native code is implemented in C++ which runs faster than UnrealScript.

For the custom path-indicators in Gotcha Again I needed to do both, but luckily TrackTwo knew a trick that allowed me to avoid having to modify the XComGame object, which left me with only needing to modify a native implementation. Since this is never possible, my solution was to override the implementation, replacing it entirely. This will undoubtedly cost a bit of performance, but the functionality of the code Gotcha Again overrides is so simple that it should not matter: Native code still takes care of figuring out where to place the indicators, it is simply the placing of them that I took over doing...