Onward they march
Added 2018-08-17 13:05:56 +0000 UTCMore WIP droid animation tests from Chaz. Trying out various different sizes of battledroid from small to medium.
We're having to rethink the tiny footprint robots a bit... in the "original" Revenge of the Titans, "gidlets" and "droids" were these tiny little units that were so small that they could just slip through barriers and they could walk through occupied tiles and each other with impunity. In 2D you can get away with this and it looks perfectly fine. In 3D, when stuff starts to walk through other solid looking stuff, it looks ... less than perfectly fine.
So the choice I have is to a) ignore it and just let them clip through each other - though I might have to prevent them getting through barricades nonetheless b) accommodate them properly and have the pathing algorithm deal with very small units that take up a quarter of a tile or c) just not have tiny units and make the smallest unit footprint 1x1 tile (that's 16x16 voxels).
Comments
It does look really nice when they're all A* pathing though - they exhibit a sort of emergent fluid behaviour. It is quite expensive to calculate A* for every single unit... but it makes for a nice battle, which is really what the game is all about. I might nonetheless investigate flocking at some point as it would appear to give similar results but with less computation.
Puppygames
2018-08-24 11:57:33 +0000 UTCPathing that many units at once sounds nightmarish... Have you tried a group pathfinding solution, then have the group do some sort of flocking behavior instead. Vastly less A*, and flocking isn't all that hard, programmatically or computationally. Or you could break it down a bit. Big bots path, little bots flock.
Person
2018-08-23 18:26:50 +0000 UTCI'm going with A for now too keeping the options open to make it flexible if I need to change my mind or Chaz fusses over it too much :P He might have to make the really small units a bit smaller than they are currently (8x8) though. Oddly it's not really a problem for enemy units because if an enemy tries to clip a friendly then they do a melee attack instead of moving.
Puppygames
2018-08-19 12:38:35 +0000 UTCMy vote is for A... but how about a particle effect when they phase through an object so that it looks intentional and not like a glitch?
Zyrix
2018-08-17 16:50:15 +0000 UTC
