Visual Debugging
Before I get too far, I want to take a quick aside to quickly mention the visual debugging tool I put in for both spawning AND performance management. Doing full on debugging of thousands of potential spawn points is all well and good if you have a specific issue to solve, and doing log debugging at that scale is basically just log spam. What I wanted was a way to quickly get a read on what the overall system was up to at any time. I needed to see what possible spawn points are out there and whether they’re considered for spawning. I needed to see where AI are running around in the scene, as well as get a rough idea of what performance bucket they’re in. I wrapped all that into a unified top-down radar that I could toggle in non-shipping builds.
In its simplest form, the radar is simply a visual indicator of AI in the scene relative to the shark. The color of the indicator is representative of which performance bucket they’re in. I’ll cover those specifics a bit more later. The next layer of the radar added information about active spawn points.
Yellow points are the ones that are actively being considered for spawning, and red points are the ones that are actively valid for spawning based on a number of different factors. Eating things will also cause a local area cooldown to go into effect for spawn locations, and I visualize that as a change to light blue points.
With these tools in place, during any normal gameplay session I could keep an eye on the general circumstances around spawning, see problem areas, and then investigate those more thoroughly, rather than simply having guesswork at places where things may be going wrong.