[Call to action] Swarm/Mob/Flock/etc experiments project

[Ivorforce]

This thread is an invitation to participate in the design exploration of a potential Swarm/Mob/Flock/Crowd simulation system. For details, see the original Swarm/Mob/Flock/etc. proposal.

For a more general discussion, or if you have questions, please use the Swarm/Mob/Flock/etc megathread instead.

How to participate

You can participate in either of 2 roles: As a demo designer, or as a systems designer.

As a demo designer, your goal is to create a challenge for the systems designers. You will create games or demos with scenes that have large amounts of entities. Try to leverage the systems at your disposal to squeeze every possible drop of performance from the engine, whether it be using optimal GDScript code, "cheating" by using particles, or even accessing RenderingDevice directly to optimize rendering performance. We recommend using the builtin profilier, or even C++ profilers if you're ambitious.
Your only rules are that you should use GDScript, and that your demo looks and feels like a slice of an actual game (rather than just spawning 10000 cylinders and calling it a day). The more game-y your demo is, the better :)
When you're done, post your challenge here. Hopefully, systems designers will pick it up and try to optimize your demo. You can try to iterate with systems designer to further increase the difficulty of your challenge as they're optimizing it.

As a systems designer, your goal is to solve the challenges put up by the demo designers. Choose any demo that has been posted, and try to make it faster by implementing a GDExtension or module. You should use C++ profilers and gpu profilers to identify and solve bottlenecks. Try to faithfully recreate or optimize the demo, to achieve significantly better performance than the baseline. When you're done, post your solution as a response to the demo designer. Together, you can iterate to make your solution even faster, or easier to use.

Workflow

• demo designers post challenges in this thread.
• systems designers optimize the challenges and post their solutions as responses to the challenges.
• demo designers iterate with the systems designers to increase the difficulty of the challenge, or to figure out usable general interfaces for the designed system.

Good luck, and have fun!