Zetheros
Developer
Hey Exanimates,
As mentioned last week, with our major development goals for this update being done or very nearly, we're wrapping things up, putting in some final touches, doing some initial testing and so on.
We've made some further improvements to the new pathfinding beyond our base requirements. One tricky problem that came up during testing is that while the pathfinding itself is very fast, dynamic updates to the map when there's lots of objects moving across a large zone could be quite expensive. After exploring various optimisation strategies we finally got this running 150 times faster, so that's solved.
Something we mentioned we wanted to do in this update and we're working on now is improving player movement. This is actually something we've been wanting to do for a very long time, because we think it's important and will make the gameplay experience much smoother. In most games when a character tries to move past a wall or an obstacle they will basically just run on the spot and slide along it, but this doesn't work with our physics so the characters must slow down and stop. This can make walls and other barriers feel almost sticky, sometimes forcing you to turn and wiggle the mouse around to start moving again. It also means being unable to perform that critical dodge if your inputs aren't angled just right.
Our solution to this is to try to find a slightly corrected path for the movement automatically and also try to determine if the character may be able to attempt the movement even if strict pathing data doesn't agree. This doesn't mean it will make major course corrections for you, but just small adjustments and concessions that should make movement a lot more fluid and responsive. This is not quite as simple as it may sound, and needs to be well optimised as it must work for AI characters in the same way as players, each of which need to evaluate thousands of potential movement options every second. We figured it was time to finally tackle this as it should be a huge improvement to core gameplay.
We've got a few more things to test and tune, pathfinding and especially AI are things that need to be tweaked to perform as intended, but we really don't expect any more difficult problems at this point. Once things are more or less on the right track we can get your help and feedback with this, while we focus more on the content side of things and some supporting little features.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
As mentioned last week, with our major development goals for this update being done or very nearly, we're wrapping things up, putting in some final touches, doing some initial testing and so on.
We've made some further improvements to the new pathfinding beyond our base requirements. One tricky problem that came up during testing is that while the pathfinding itself is very fast, dynamic updates to the map when there's lots of objects moving across a large zone could be quite expensive. After exploring various optimisation strategies we finally got this running 150 times faster, so that's solved.
Something we mentioned we wanted to do in this update and we're working on now is improving player movement. This is actually something we've been wanting to do for a very long time, because we think it's important and will make the gameplay experience much smoother. In most games when a character tries to move past a wall or an obstacle they will basically just run on the spot and slide along it, but this doesn't work with our physics so the characters must slow down and stop. This can make walls and other barriers feel almost sticky, sometimes forcing you to turn and wiggle the mouse around to start moving again. It also means being unable to perform that critical dodge if your inputs aren't angled just right.
Our solution to this is to try to find a slightly corrected path for the movement automatically and also try to determine if the character may be able to attempt the movement even if strict pathing data doesn't agree. This doesn't mean it will make major course corrections for you, but just small adjustments and concessions that should make movement a lot more fluid and responsive. This is not quite as simple as it may sound, and needs to be well optimised as it must work for AI characters in the same way as players, each of which need to evaluate thousands of potential movement options every second. We figured it was time to finally tackle this as it should be a huge improvement to core gameplay.
We've got a few more things to test and tune, pathfinding and especially AI are things that need to be tweaked to perform as intended, but we really don't expect any more difficult problems at this point. Once things are more or less on the right track we can get your help and feedback with this, while we focus more on the content side of things and some supporting little features.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
