Zetheros
Developer
Hey Exanimates,
We're working on the implementation of the new pathfinding system we described last week. We did discuss quite a lot, but once we get the fundamentals in we should immediately have something functional and we can then gradually leverage everything it supports, building on a future proof system. These fundamentals we're trying to get through right now are of course the difficult part though.
The most challenging aspect of this new pathfinding system is building the 3D map. This is quite complex and it needs to be a completely automatic process which happens at run time. This is a rule we impose for everything, all content, including saved games which are fully persistent copies of the world, needs to just work as is. Nothing is done by hand or even precomputed, which also means it doesn't need to be revisited or updated as engine systems change. This makes developing, iterating on and maintaining content extremely easy and smooth, which is something that also translates very well to modding.
This means it all needs to be very fast, and it needs to happen in the background, so as to not impact loading times and support streaming content. There are some other related changes we're working towards that will massively reduce loading times. Physics objects then use an additional layer and system to make dynamics changes without having to rebuild the map.
There's a lot of considerations and technical challenges here, but we think we've figured out all the details and we're well into the implementation already. This was our other major goal for this update besides force and hopefully we can wrap it up fairly quickly.
Happy Spooktober! Boo!
-the BM team
We're working on the implementation of the new pathfinding system we described last week. We did discuss quite a lot, but once we get the fundamentals in we should immediately have something functional and we can then gradually leverage everything it supports, building on a future proof system. These fundamentals we're trying to get through right now are of course the difficult part though.
The most challenging aspect of this new pathfinding system is building the 3D map. This is quite complex and it needs to be a completely automatic process which happens at run time. This is a rule we impose for everything, all content, including saved games which are fully persistent copies of the world, needs to just work as is. Nothing is done by hand or even precomputed, which also means it doesn't need to be revisited or updated as engine systems change. This makes developing, iterating on and maintaining content extremely easy and smooth, which is something that also translates very well to modding.
This means it all needs to be very fast, and it needs to happen in the background, so as to not impact loading times and support streaming content. There are some other related changes we're working towards that will massively reduce loading times. Physics objects then use an additional layer and system to make dynamics changes without having to rebuild the map.
There's a lot of considerations and technical challenges here, but we think we've figured out all the details and we're well into the implementation already. This was our other major goal for this update besides force and hopefully we can wrap it up fairly quickly.
Happy Spooktober! Boo!
-the BM team
