
Introducing the Slaughtermap Mode! When enabled, it will alter NashGore to be active only when monsters are near you (adjustable distance and amount of active actors), rather than enabling NashGore level-wide. What this means is, slaughtermaps will actually be
somewhat playable. I don't guarantee
good framerates, but at least you'll have a chance to play NashGore with insane monster counts.
So how does it fair? I will be trying Okuplok (23,217 monsters!!!), with a fairly stacked load order:

Notice that I have also SpriteShadows loaded, which will be brutal because it usually will double the actor count. But thanks to some upstream optimization, that too is playable with slaughtermaps (as you'll see in the next few images).
tl;dr even just these two mods alone - SpriteShadow and NashGore - will be an absolutely killer stress test.
Disclaimer: of course I'm playing with cheats here, specifically god mode and sv_fastweapons 2 and sv_infiniteammo 1. My goal here is to stress test, not to challenge myself to play and conquer this map under normal circumstances.



On average, I am getting 20 - 30 FPS. That is absolutely CRAZY! Under normal circumstances, with SpriteShadow and NashGore alone, it would literally be unplayable. I mean the game would literally just freeze as soon as the battle starts. I had to finally disable SpriteShadows (temporarily) at that room on that last image - it finally dipped to single digit frames soon after I took the screenshot. :^)

Despite that - I finally made it to the end (at some point I re-enabled SpriteShadow, after that room was cleared - it was playable again). I missed 7 monsters, but look at that frame rate - 119 FPS with all monsters dead. With Slaughtermap Mode disabled, this would not be possible - it would drop to single digits, regardless if the monsters are awake, alive or dead. That is because, as I said in the first paragraph - NashGore is unconditionally enabled map-wide. Yes, this also means that with Slaughtermap Mode enabled, actors outside your little "ring" will not received NashGore effects - meaning if you shoot a zombieman with a rocket launcher and it hits outside of the active range, the zombieman won't spawn the NashGore gib effects (it will just XDeath vanilla-style). But I mean come on, in a typical slaughtermap situation, you realistically won't have time to even notice the missing effects - you'd be struggling to stay alive with bad frame rates anyway. :P
Oh and the cherry on top? Slaughtermap Mode is 100% multiplayer-compatible. Tested and working. Each player will act as a radius to determine which monsters to optimize.
So now I can unironically claim that yes, NashGore can handle the measly 10,617 monsters of nuts.wad, because it's capable of handling Okuplok's 23,217 monsters. :P
There is a huge update coming. The mod has received so many new features and bug fixes that the next version might as well be dubbed version 2.0. I will be posting a video update soon to showcase the new goodies coming in the next version. Stay tuned!