This looks really interesting. My project probably don’t need to have too smart AIs, but do need good quality LODs.
You mentioned using shader to animate a static mesh, I’d assume that would be baking vertices local offset to a map, and UV offset to get the animation frame to get value.
But since I am not quite experienced on the material system yet, how do you avoid texture filtering/mipmapping to alter the value you want? (like access precise which pixel to get.)
Maybe I’m just overthinking it, you could just have a pre-allocated array of vertices info per frame and just have shader call a function to fetch the result.
But that’s on GPU, and I don’t know how to do this properly.
Questions, what’s the requirement for the LODs you have there? You mentioned bone amount, how many poly could affect performance.
So the real question then becomes, how do you budget the amount of AIs?
It would involve overhead to go through all the AIs, run the AI action, draw them with animation blended.
What do you use as guide to generate your content? Like for 100 agents, AI action can not be over 1ms, and draw them should take less than 3ms?