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Asked: 2026-05-16T11:52:07+00:00

I’m making a simple RTS game. I want it to run very fast because

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I’m making a simple RTS game. I want it to run very fast because it should work with thousands of units and 8 players.

Everything seems to work flawlessly but it seems the line of sight calculation is a bottleneck. It’s simple: if an enemy unit is closer than any of my unit’s LOS range it will be visible.

Currently I use a quite naive algorithm: for every enemy units I check whether any of my units is see him. It’s O(n^2)

So If there are 8 players and they have 3000 units each that would mean 3000*21000=63000000 tests per player at the worst case. Which is quite slow.

More details: it’s a stupid simple 2D space RTS: no grid, units are moving along a straight lines everywhere and there is no collision so they can move through each other. So even hundreds of units can be at the same spot.

I want to speed up this LOS algorithm somehow. Any ideas?

EDIT:

So additional details:

  • I meant one player can have even 3000 units.
  • my units have radars so they towards all directions equally.
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Use a spatial data structure to efficiently look up units by location.

    Additionally, if you only care whether a unit is visible, but not which unit spotted it, you can do

    for each unit
    mark the regions this unit sees in your spatial data structure

    and have:

    isVisible(unit) = isVisible(region(unit))

    A very simple spatial data structure is the grid: You overlay a coarse grid over the playing field. The regions are this grid’s cells. You allocate an array of regions, and for each region keep of list of units presently in this region.

    You may also find Muki Haklay’s demonstration of spatial indexes useful.

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