In plenty of video games where you are largely not restricted to do anything you want, including spawning lots of new objects, especially when each of them is enabled with physics behavior and perhaps also have some sort of unique type information stored in them, you run the risk of ending up in a situation of lagging the game severely.
Basically a real-time game simulation can turn into a slideshow, because its trying to compute something too heavy for a computer to handle. This applies to Starsector and similar games with lots of physics/collision enabled objects. This problem alone limits how big battles can be or how complex ships and their systems are allowed to be.
This is a bit of a hypothetical challenge to see if there is a way to come up with some sort of optimization solution, that would allow for larger amounts of objects to exist at once and make mass events not cause severe lag in a game.
Essentially, its an attempt to see if or how lag can be eliminated in a complex real time simulation, such as Starsector, with stuff like ships, asteroids, nebulas, projectiles, beams, trails and explosions, by finding a balance that would still allow the game to uphold the complexity of a Starsector-like simulation while allowing it to simulate much larger events, with more ships and more objects, without generating lag.
This can be done either by creating a convincing illusion using or using some sort of optimization trick that while might sacrifice some accuracy in the physics or rendering calculation of huge epic events, it at least makes them plausible without turning the game into a slideshow or slowing it down significantly.
Look at this image:
In the center there is a player ship, meanwhile around it are lots of asteroids flying randomly. Each asteroid is unique and each of them store information individually on things like Size, What its made from, Direction its flying in and Speed at which it flies at. Everything has the ability to collide or get collided with and they can be influenced by a force, such as gravity to move.
There are a few important rules:1. No matter is allowed to be destroyed or created, it can only change shape or type. (Asteroids can turn into clouds of harmless dust when shot at or destroyed, but never removed from existence. This dust remains in the background and its possible to collect it to compress new asteroids out of that dust)
2. Each asteroid must retain its uniqueness in the end, even if some sort of simulation accuracy is omitted during the phase at which lag happens.
3. The game must not turn into a slideshow if laggy situation happens.
4. What ever optimizations are done, the game must still feel consistent (from the player's perspective)
The goal is to make the simulation work in the way that it follows the above rules, but must never get to a point where the game will lag.What can you think of that could achieve this goal? The optimizations can be anything as long as they keep in mind the rules mentioned above and don't break them.
