gamedev-the-steward/docs/benchmarks/SIMULATION_SCALING_BASELINE_03.md

Simulation scaling baseline 03

This is the first reviewed capture of benchmark workload schema 2, full_fidelity_combatant_headless_arrival_v2. Unlike baselines 01 and 02, the fixture now gives every synthetic NPC exactly one authoritative combatant record and rejects missing, duplicate, orphaned, or mismatched coverage. It also exercises the current state-schema 14 conflict tick.

The machine-readable samples are in simulation_scaling_baseline_03.json. They were captured on the same Apple_M1_Max_64_GB host label with Godot 4.7, seed 8088, 10 warmup ticks, 200 measured ticks, and three samples per case.

Results

Case	NPCs	Seeded history	Median us/tick	Ticks/s	Simulated realtime	Arrival share	End JSON
Population 6	6	0	114.42	8,740.11	10,488.1x	3.4%	0.06 MiB
Population 60	60	0	904.73	1,105.30	1,326.4x	3.0%	0.58 MiB
Population 600	600	0	11,033.58	90.63	108.8x	2.8%	5.83 MiB
History 600	60	600	992.78	1,007.28	1,208.7x	2.8%	0.72 MiB
History 6,000	60	6,000	1,667.58	599.67	719.6x	1.7%	2.06 MiB

Every sample in every case produced the same final checksum. The 600-person fixture sustains about 90.6 ticks per second—well above the 50-tick local reference—while updating all 600 combatants. Indexed manager callbacks reduce the deterministic immediate-arrival phase to 2.8% of that case; cached combatant ID ordering separately bounds work inside the simulation phase.

Versioning decision

Do not compare baseline-03 checksums or timings directly with baselines 01/02. Those reports predate combat and accidentally retained only the manager's six initial combatants after replacing the synthetic population. The workload ID and schema are bumped so this semantic change is explicit. Baselines 01/02 remain useful historical evidence for the population-view optimization, but baseline 03 is the valid comparison point for future full-fidelity simulation changes.

This still excludes world scenes, rendering, navigation, and NpcVisual. High/low gameplay-camera frame-time and GPU/memory captures on representative weak hardware remain a separate presentation ledger task; the data-only result does not claim rendered 600-NPC support.

Capture command

/Applications/Godot.app/Contents/MacOS/Godot \
  --headless --path "$PWD" \
  --script res://tools/benchmark_simulation_scaling.gd -- \
  --host-label=Apple_M1_Max_64_GB \
  --output=res://docs/benchmarks/simulation_scaling_baseline_03.json