Quote Originally Posted by Gleeok View Post
This game ran on 1985 hardware and had ports to the NES and similar systems. Pretty amazing stuff if you think about it. Certainly you couldn't just collide every enemy with every other object every frame?! So.. how'd they do it?
Gauntlet II had a 68K family CPU running at a decent speed. I'm sure they tried to be efficient about it but it's not a miracle. And on a modern PC I don't see why anyone would be concerned with performance by having a number of NPCs doing things. I think you are right that these concerns come from people with experience with those "DoEverything" game maker programs that try to do everything but don't really do anything very well.

On older systems if cpu time per frame becomes an issue you can try to reduce the processing load by not doing everything every frame but only every other frame or when some key event happens. It all depends on what you're doing but on a modern PC I don't see game logic in a game such as this ever being a serious performance problem. Maybe if you have a whole ton of objects doing complicated things but this just doesn't seem likely.

It's nice to see there is apparently an active project here. I've been trying to motivate myself to work on a project lately but the usual concerns tend to be artistic support.