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#1 Grass and Animated Sprites introduced

Published May 19, 2018
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Hello,

this time i have worked on

  • the ability to animate sprites,
  • small but essential system changes,
  • growing grass (to get a gist of the basic procedure i might use),
  • developing a field of view algorithm for the entitys that are exploring the world

Watch a short clip here: Video

This took me longer then expected due to some bugs I encountered in the process.

Next up I will probably have to carefully think on how I will not only proceed but also if my current setup is worth keeping, as retrieveing positions with my current build is quiet a hassle and will hurt performance once I start using field of view and pathfinding algorithms. I might have to give the world a fixed size (which i have some good solutions to make that aspect a feature). 

It would really help me what you guys think has to be changed with dwarf fortress in terms of gameplay, as it decides how the game is built. So I would appreciate it if you could tell me either via PM or here in the comments your opinion on the matter.

2 likes 6 comments

Comments

Awoken

First off let me say I'm very interested in what you're doing, especially if you plan including field of view. 

Quote

Next up I will probably have to carefully think on how I will not only proceed but also if my current setup is worth keeping, as retrieveing positions with my current build is quiet a hassle and will hurt performance once I start using field of view and pathfinding algorithms. I might have to give the world a fixed size (which i have some good solutions to make that aspect a feature). by @GRASBOCK WindyOrange


It's interesting that you mention that.  For the project I'm currently working on I need a finite world because everything will have to be itematized. You probably could include many, if not all, of those features in a procedural build, it would just take a lot of planning.  All parts would have to be synchronous rather than layered.  Maybe I'm just babbling.

I watched your vid.   I was going to ask whether your grass growing alg is build-wide or if it was localised to the area the user is interacting with.  In the video it looks as though the grass only grows if a user is viewing a certain segment.

Otherwise, very interesting stuff.

May 19, 2018 10:43 PM
GRASBOCK WindyOrange

Thanks for the respond. The grass actually grows even out of canvas (which is supposed to happen) but the animations are not (which is at the moment not such a big issue; but definitly not needed). I think that you suspected it would only grow in the chunks i am looking at because of a graphics glitch i am getting, where at certain zoom levels not all chunks that should be captured are rendered. This is the sudden disappearing of rendered chunks and the sides of the screen. I will fix it when i am certain that i will keep the setup i have right now.

23 minutes ago, Awoken said:

For the project I'm currently working on I need a finite world because everything will have to be itematized. You probably could include many, if not all, of those features in a procedural build, it would just take a lot of planning.  All parts would have to be synchronous rather than layered.

I didn not really understand what you said there. Right now I am very open to Ideas so i would be glad if you could clarify that part. What do you mean by itematized and which features did you mean and what does synchronous and layered mean? 

Originally I intended to make the height and depth limitless and the whole world independend of coordinates (just relative positions). I have looked at your Project where i saw little humans. I assume you intend to make them interact with the world. How will you do that? Figuring out what object of interest to the little humans are nearby that is.

Thanks for showing interest

 

May 19, 2018 11:24 PM
Awoken

I must admit each of those terms; itematized, synchronous, layered, and their application to programming is something I made up.

I can let you know what it means to me though,

Itematized: everything in the generated world is accounted for and countable.  So there is a finite set of predetermined things such as trees, stone volume and what not.

synchronous as opposed to layered:  I guess what I'm trying to convey is the idea of developing all parts of a procedural world in tandem, so to give you an example.  If I was to try to incorporate pathfinding into a procedural world I'd probably start by creating the navigation mesh, then build my environment around what ever the navigation mesh spits out.  Rather than build the world, then add the nav mesh.  So kinda like when one component of the world is built it is keeping in mind what else needs to exist in the build.  Layered would be the opposite.  Building separate parts and then pain painstakingly linking them all up.  

Did that make any sense?

18 hours ago, GRASBOCK WindyOrange said:

Figuring out what object of interest to the little humans are nearby that is.

It'll be based on each persons position ( x,y,z ) and their priority list.  Do they want to fetch water? hunt? cut down a tree?    Let's say they want to cut down a tree.  They will then look for the closest tree to their position walk over and start choppin.
 

May 20, 2018 06:18 PM
GRASBOCK WindyOrange

I think i understand. This will get fairly difficult.

May 20, 2018 09:09 PM
Eck

How's the DF project coming? The world needs more DF. :)

June 18, 2018 09:13 PM
GRASBOCK WindyOrange

I am glad to hear that somebody is interested. The last month my university gave me a lot of work and pressure and i can't really keep up. However tomorrow i will have to deliver what I have done and thus i will start to get free time to think again. But there was another issue: I wanted to introduce a different (much simpler) world system (which i can't really show with pictures) but will immensely improve performance for bigger world with more entities. Since I am working a lot with pointers i got problems with Segfault and couldn't seem to find any reason as to why for a whole week. I am sorry to say, that it might still take some time (i hope for a maximum of a week) until i can get that new world system running and show something new that is actually game related. Thanks for motivating me though!

June 19, 2018 12:19 PM
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