Introduction
What is precalculation?
Precalculation is a process of generating a file that contains path to a position from every other position in the room. Precalculation also refers to the file generated by the process, depending on the context.
Precalculation is tied to your Ability Settings. Precalculation has to be done again when you change your ability settings. However, you only have to do single batch of precalculation per ability settings.
Each secret in a room requires multiple precalculation for various target destinations and room states.
(Room state is a state that a room can be in. Doors primarily affect the # of room states. For example, a room with 2 door will have 2^2 = 4room states)
How do I precalculate?
There are 2 methods you can do.
- Precalculate on the cloud (Takes 30 minutes) - Recommended
- Precalculate on your pc (Takes more than 24 hours)
The time is for doing precalculation on all secrets in all rooms
The speed difference is caused by difference in compute capacity.
Dungeons Guide precalculates on the cloud using a lot of vcpus, meaning more precalculations are done in parallel.
However your pc only has only a fraction of that, which makes it take more time than using cloud.
Why precalculate?
Dungeons Guide before experimental releases generated paths to certain destination on user's pc. This turned out to be very resource intensive causing many fps issues and lags. And with more powerful features like etherwarp and stonking getting added to pathfinder, it became infeasible to generate paths on the fly. Also advanced features like Smart Route require that pathfinding to be done within sub-milisecond, making precalculation necessary.