Honestly, hard to say. We do have 30-40 agents running at any point starting mid game, and I’m not sure this tool was made to run that many at a time on older hardware (i.e. xbox one). In some games, you might be able to turn off some actions when not near the player/off-screen, but in our game, the AI needs to run no mater where in the level the player/camera is.
In general,
When using BehaviorTrees, do not enter and exit states unnecessarily.
When using BehaviorTrees, not to overuse Dynamic as it does require checking conditions each frame
When using BehaviorTrees, keep logic simple. This is subjective of course, but I think our BT is just too complicated and probably would have done better to write it using a FSM. I was just really new to it all and picked one direction and by the time we got to porting and profiling, it was too late to change.
In general make sure your states don’t create garbage, attempt to have a zero-garbage policy.
We got a small performance gain by making our own “node” that managed the leaf node states as a state machine rather than using concepts from a BT – it’s super hacky, but it got us 5-10 frames back.
atrivedi
