Show HN: SimAirport – Our 'pivot' from web dev

It's the one thing I can't talk about publicly, as much as I'd really, really love to. All I can really say is that we're in the process of securing the trademark right now; and we definitely obtained counsel's advice, far before deciding on & moving forward with the name. =)

Unfortunately we're hitting some scaling issues, we're exploring some ways around them, but even in "clean slate" tests we're struggling to exceed ~10k agents in motion without framerates starting to dwindle. We've also very quickly learned that multi-threaded development is, or can be, quite difficult & tedious. Things can go wrong in even more ways than we'd have imagined, though it has been a fun challenge too.

Right now, players with higher-end computers are reporting that they're able to push ~3k or so "pax" (passenger agents) before framerates start to get choppy.

When we receive save game files with bugs to look into, and we load them up and see 4-5k+ pax, we cringe a bit (and it's even worse w/ all our logging on, etc). ;-)

As far as details go, the algorithm for passenger needs/desires/selection is pretty neat -- it uses "delta need scoring", it's quite a robust approach & also a decently-scalable system.

Yep, we used Unity. It gets a hard time sometimes, but if you treat it just like you would any other toolset/language/tool, it really is pretty great. It's also pretty easy to jump into, and have something running quick (Hello World style), though definitely takes some time to get used to the different paradigms and the "Unity Way".

I think these are free assets, Rimworld looks a lot like Prison Architect, and I have seen other indie games with the same assets.

Why would PA fans be upset? There's a whole other game to experience now, with a similar look and feel to their favourite...

I'm curious about this as well. I feel like there is a lack of context. Who is this? What does this have to do with web dev?. The company is LVGameDev LLC, but I can't find anything about them beside that they made this game. Is there a previous HN posting I should be reading as well?