I've been putting multiple doors on my buildings to make sure there's no congestion and that colonists have direct routes to where they're most likely to be going so the game doesn't have to calculate complex routes. It occurred to me though that might make more work for the CPU, having to take all those doors into account for its pathfinding calculations. Anyone know?
Depends on the pathfinding algorithm used. If it's A* then my guess would be that, while you might be able to speed up colonist trips by reducing doorway contention, it won't increase the cost of finding the path. On the other hand, every time you place or remove a building, door, gabion, anything that obstructs pathing, all actors will recalculate their paths simultaneously...
Purely from a computational perspective: it doesn't matter. We just add or remove the doors, and the A* cost is going to be the same regardless of if there is one more open, or closed, node anywhere.
I generally only put doors on my 'office' type buildings, like bunkhouses, barracks and things like that. All my workshops get the big sliding door instead to increase traffic flow. Not sure if it actually works or not, but I like the look of it
Side effect of using loading bay doors: they're basically free. If you don't build the module, you don't spend the resources, but the colonists can still walk through the aperture. Of course, if colonists were to react negatively to long periods of their workshops/sleeping areas standing incomplete, this might be different... (Perhaps unbuilt modules gain a despair field over time that counteracts positive workshop quality, with longer meaning worse feeling. This would have to be attached to the building itself and only decay slowly, so it couldn't be worked around by deleting and recreating the module designations repeatedly, or some similar approach... "He was angry/depressed at the lack of progress towards fitting out his/her work area.")
That would be kinda neat. Though first step toward that would probably be to have colonists get a tad annoyed about working in pitch black work places with no natural light. At the moment colonists are totally fine with operating dangerous machinery in the pitch black from what I can tell, rendering windows nothing but a pointless resource sink since they stopped giving decorative points in favour of turning sating quality into just placing miles of rug down.
