Family Time Development Part 5 - Commands and Digging

Video shows the summary, text shows the technical!

This week:

Commands

Digging

Commands

Commands are a really cool feature because of how item management will work in the game. The player will not have an inventory system (for large objects). Instead you'll need to use your feral children to handle objects for you. Certain items require different formations to carry the object. For example the log requires 3 agents, a rock will require 2 agents. I may make an item chest of sorts later (probably a shed) so you can store items in a compact manner.

I will also eventually tie behaviors to pick up commands, so if you don't feed them, they may get cranky and take longer to carry things.

For the record I've never played Pikmin before but from Pikmin cover art I assume this is what they did too?

Digging

This is a huge feature for the game because nearly everything from collisions to pathfinding revolves around this type of terrain: heightfield. The map size is fixed to 4096x4096x256 because the pathfinding is compressed for memory and performance by assigning a cell to an unsigned integer. So for example cell (-100,5,100) (3 integers) in the map is internally 2,252,547,996 (1 unsigned integer). This is especially useful for GPU collisions because everything should be as tiny as possible when you want speed in the GPU (reduce memory bandwidth) usage.

However because it is a heightfield this does mean you cannot make caves or overhangs. But that's okay because you can still make caves and overhangs with the building system which is likewise baked into the limits of unsigned integers.

Steep inclines make you slide so it's possible to make a giant slide and then drop yourself or a child down it.

One of the reasons I wanted to do a heightfield like this is because I wanted pathfinding for thousands of characters but also smooth terrain. Unfortunately I'm sick of blocky terrain like Minecraft so I opted for something like this. This heightfield feature is totally custom made and is crazy fast!

Stay tuned!