The plan was to add a dynamic spawning system and release it. After a few days I got it working but realised that if I want to spawn characters during the game, maybe a few per minute, I need to improve the performance. And if I want to have an open world that will create whole sections every now and then, I have to improve the performance. Especially that even without the dynamic spawning and an open world the game could run horribly. Mind that I now talk about the Quest version as the more things I optimise, the less problematic the PC version is.

That's why I spent more time on optimising stuff than adding the dynamic spawning system. I was also a few days off. Well, almost off as I still managed to identify a few things to optimise and improve.

I will describe in details how the dynamic spawning system works and what was optimised in two separate entries. For now, I will just tell you that while both things are not fully there yet, I am quite happy with how they turned out.

The dynamic spawning makes the game a bit more dynamic as the enemies may appear more often. That's unless you kill enough of them to "clear the area". There are a few issues with the enemies spawning in a lesser number in inaccessible corridors and balconies but then, there were lots of them just standing there and doing nothing that didn't make much sense anyway. For the dynamic spawning, only when the open-world is implemented, it will make more sense to work on the dynamic spawning system, tweak how many characters there are per spawning region, how big spawning regions should be, etc.

As for the optimisations I did, right now I was able to squeeze the whole CPU work related to gameplay into half a frame but... that was only happening under specific circumstances and when there was no background level generation. Which is not what I want to have. I managed to squeeze it into less than a frame in most of the cases, using a single CPU which leaves the second one to background work. The biggest problems are occasional hitches that will have to be investigated one by one. There are also other problems that I will be checking out right after I publish this build.

I know that when I get to the open-world I will end up just walking around to see how far can I get, as the system will allow for an endless world. Can't wait to have it working. But what I want to do even more is to rip the gameplay apart and reconstruct it.