Looks like Lee's reading my blog, his update had a very similar format.
https://www.thegamecreators.com/post/gameguru-progress-update
Right now there's also a pretty interesting set of discussions on the webforums on two topics that are near and dear to my heart with #gamedev:
First off, there's a good discussion going on Terrain Generation and modification externally:
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/218797
In that thread we have actual source code on how the file for m.dat is output (m.dat is the map data found inside of the fpm file, which is really just a zip file using the password 'mypassword').
Apparently it's just a 1024x1024 array of floats, with a 00004000 metadata tag at the beginning. There's a lot that can be done here. Apparently game-guru does a lot of the actual interpolation/etc so it *SHOULD* smooth a significant amount of it between each floating point value.
Then you have several AI related discussions:
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/218792
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/218816
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/218810
Mostly centered around AI performance. The big issue is people are making 'hordes' of zombies and it's pooping out game-guru. Big surprise there. Most AI is written as a singular entity and eats a lot of cycles. Writing mob-based AI is completely different. I might have to step in on this one though I'm really tremendously rusty on AI writing. It'll be a lot of work. But basically if I recall you kind of give each 'mob' zombie a sort of thin-client style AI where there's one main process and a bunch of minor processes. The main process then controls the subprocesses. You need functions for computing things such as the centroid (a fancy way of saying a central point they can all reach). It's a big project, something that would eat a lot of cycles I don't have.
In other news, I got a request from a customer to add a timer or minute/time tracker. It should effectively be easy enough to implement. I may actually go do that myself if given the time.
Some good stuff out there on the forums, which have generally died down due to a lack of interest from lack of obvious development - but definitely keep your eyes peeled.
3 comments:
Any thoughts on the randomly generated terrain that Star Citizen is doing on their end?
Nah, at this point I don't have any kind of thoughts on that. I haven't been following their development beyond the loose check from time to time. If you have an industry article or something I can read I'll take a glance though.
Nothing in depth yet. Their planetary generation algorithms are pretty freaking amazing though, and apparently way better than No Man's Sky.
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