2D Game: Fast(est) way to find x closest entities for another entity - huge amount of entities, highly dynamic

Question

I\'m working on a 2D game that has a huge amount of dynamic entities. For fun\'s sake, let\'s call them soldiers, and let\'s say there are 50000 of them (which I just randomly t

Answer 1

The simplest approach is to use a grid. It has several advantages:

• simple
• fast
• easy to add and remove objects
• easy to change the grid to a finer detail if you are still doing too many distance checks

Also, make sure you don't do a squareroot for every distance check. Since you are only comparing the distances, you can also compare the distance squared.