Better Arena Audience - Fun Bit (Patreon)

Someone mentioned horrible audience models in the arena and after a 4 seconds search I bumped to this thread in forum It looks like there is a quite a bit of people who are making fun with these decisions, rightly so, because it looks ridiculous for a scene that's not “heavy” in terms of performance. (Scroll down for link and stuff if you don't care)

To give a bit of background, it's a common practice to use billboard/fake people in such stadium/arena places to take off the heavy load from the scene to make it more performance friendly. However, in this case, in a game where it supposedly works and optimized for at least 50v50 battles, using this system for saving a bit of performance is ridiculous. Especially if they are this close to the player and clearly visible during gameplay. So I said, why not I change this? Should be easy, after all. So I did. Here, culture specific mixed audience with randomized NPC faces and cloth colors. They also go nuts (cheerwise) after first round of tournaments. 

But I have to say, it took more time than I expected because of weird tournament logic. Like first iteration worked without any issues in regular arena and written in 30 mins or so. Tournament stuff however, caused a bit problem because of the Agent check in it's own logic and each NPC required to have a tournament team - which is a problem because our audience is just there, and they shouldn't be part of any participating team. Nevertheless, I fixed this issue in another 30 mins or so.  

Then I saw this comment from Dev:

which I can say it's BS. 

Firstly, I'm almost certain that they are not looking into this, not sure why he is taking CM role and answering in this manner, but they are surely not looking into this. Secondly, if they are surely checking this, reason why they didn't implement shouldn't be related to performance, because unless they have metrics to prove me wrong, FPS-wise it's not impacting gameplay even when arena is 100% full. Yes FPS drops because you are adding more people to scene, but not in a way that it's totally unplayable. Technically you can boost FPS by removing entire arena as well - would this make it more like an arena? No. So you should find that good line between quality and performance and having garbage models as audience isn't a good sacrifice for performance. I think main issue isn't performance but because of their laziness because changing this requires some tweaks in existing tournament logic and we all know how TW feels about changing existing logics. 

Nevertheless, I'm fairly certain that TW won't change this unless they decide to revamp the tournament logic. So, here is a version where you guys try and see if it amplifies the immersion in Arena's.

Download Link:

https://drive.proton.me/urls/0NC0N4BJFG#14LAdnJLHTHD 

Password:

SomeArenaStuff