Shovel Up! Goes Remixable: Best Practices for World Builders

Essential Best Practices

Mesh Combine:Combining meshes improves performance

Key Benefits

• Faster Load Times: Combining meshes reduces the number of entities, which can significantly improve world loading speeds.
• Improved Performance: Fewer entities mean less overhead for the engine, resulting in smoother runtime performance.
• Solved Entity Limits: By merging meshes, you can bypass entity count restrictions, avoiding tedious workarounds or asset deletions.

Asset Pooling: Asset pools help memory management and load times.

Key Benefits

• Automated Per-Player Asset Assignment: Each player receives their own set of objects (e.g., HUD, starting items, effects) automatically.
• Simplified Multiplayer Logic: No need to write custom code for per-player asset management.
• Performance Improvements: Faster level loading, as pooled assets can be pre-instantiated rather than dynamically spawned at runtime.
• Flexible Design: Supports a wide range of use cases, from UI to gameplay items and effects.

Minimize Dynamic Spawning: Dynamic spawning can introduce several issues, especially in remixable contexts:

Key Benefits

• Flexibility: Enables procedural generation, inventory systems, dynamic events, and more.
• Capacity Management: Lets you work around static entity limits by only spawning objects when needed.
• Personalization: Supports per-player experiences (e.g., each player gets their own items or UI).

1. Performance & Stability

• Resource Usage: Each dynamically spawned object consumes memory and CPU. Spawning too many objects can degrade performance, cause lag, or even crash the world—especially on lower-end devices or with many concurrent players.
• Object Limits: Worlds have a maximum object/entity limit. Dynamic spawning counts against this limit, so exceeding it can break the world or cause unexpected behavior.

2. Remixability & Predictability

• Remix Complexity: If a world relies heavily on dynamic spawning, remixers may struggle to understand or control what gets created at runtime, making remixing harder and less predictable.
• Debugging: Excessive dynamic spawning can make it difficult to debug or optimize worlds, as issues may only appear under certain runtime conditions.

Dynamic Spawning Best Practices

• Minimize Dynamic Spawning: Only spawn objects when absolutely necessary, and leverage pre-spawned or pooled assets for common use cases.
• Use Asset Pooling: For per-player or frequently used objects, use asset pooling to pre-instantiate and reuse objects, reducing the need for dynamic creation.
• Set Limits in Code: Always enforce a maximum number of dynamically spawned objects to avoid exceeding world limits and maintain performance.
• Test with Max Players: Simulate or playtest with the maximum expected player count to ensure dynamic spawning.

The Ultimate Validation Step: Test With Maximum Players

• Uncover Hidden Bugs: Many issues like asset misassignment, performance bottlenecks, or synchronization errors only appear when your world is filled to capacity.
• Validate Scaling: Features that work for a handful of users may break or degrade with more. Max-player testing exposes these limits before your community does.
• Prevent Crashes and Overloads: Testing at scale helps you avoid exceeding entity, memory, or network limits, ensuring stability for all players.
• Ensure Remixability: Remixers may add new logic or assets. Testing with max players ensures your world remains robust and flexible, even as it evolves.
• Guarantee User Experience: Simulating full lobbies is the only way to confidently confirm smooth gameplay, correct asset assignment, and reliable interactions for everyone.

1. Simulate Full Lobbies: Use test accounts or automation to fill your world to its maximum player count.
2. Monitor Performance: Track frame rate, memory usage, and network traffic under load.
3. Stress Test Joins/Leaves: Rapidly add and remove players to test asset recycling and spawning logic.
4. Check Limits: Validate that entity, asset, and mesh limits are respected.
5. Remix and Retest: Remix your world and repeat max-player tests to catch new issues introduced by changes.

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