XVE - Terrain Systems - Random Noise & Influence Mechanics

Well, politics aside I thought I'd talk about my game engine and some of the new terrain systems I'm working on.

There have been a couple of images and videos on the old YouTube channel with some of the examples, but here's a still for your enjoyment... See the MASSIVE tree remains on the peak it was to place trees (of the correct scale) into a natural pattern I then turned.

I started with the same noise algorithm I'd used for the peak itself, but that tended to give me slices of trees or uncanny looking placements.

Off to CImg I started to play with some noise algorithms and after a while I got an appearance for the groups of trees I liked; at least in 2D.

 

This being me though I went to bed and got distracted with horses and so only just came back to this very late on a Sunday evening, and the first thing I did was NOT the tree placements at all, no I started with the above set of points and wanted to check my "Area of Control" system.

This basically sets up the influence from each island, as you capture them the idea being that you improve them and they become stronger nodes, more loyal maybe, and that gives you bonus points towards your various activities and influence over neighbours... Whom you might conquer.

The trick however was how to set this up by default, so I decided to play a map up into individuals, and create a sort of area influence and then depending on the range you can travel that will build networks of connections to "who you might influence" or be influenced by.

However, that got quite complex quite quickly and my world still needs to be persisted on the server/back end, soooo.....

I got distracted again and made the initial influence a voronoi diagram pattern.

 

Sometimes you just have to let your mind wander, this weekend, the little computer time I had, was definitely just letting my mind wander.

I was quite tired after the latest release at work.... And to be honest, I kind of love Jason Voorhees.

 

 

XVE Game Engine: Thinking about AOE Damage Effects

I'm back on my home game engine and I need an area damage effect, which can apply to all the members of a team/party.... The trouble?  How to synchronize this over a network connection.

First of all, I know for certain that the server running my game world knows the center of the effect, and it knows the radius of the effect.  And it does tick the effect application against each player whether their client can visually see the effect - it appears in their combat log text immediately.

So the mechanics are there, the clients however, all run at different rates, they're in different locations world wide, with different latencies to the servers source of truth.... And so I need to now think about how I am going to tackle the issue of each player seeing an effect.

Simplicity first, the effect is just going to be represented by a wireframe sphereoid, it'll be a smooth shaded sparkles dripping effect later.

This quiets my engine engineer smooth brain some what and I now just need to synchronize the expansion from the center to the maximal radius of the effect, this will turn up at the clients from the server at any time after the effect is registered as affecting the players on the server... This maybe unfair, however, there is reason behind this in the design - the player will know the effect is going to be cast as there is pre-warning from the caster... They need to learn that and move before they see the effect basically.... That is, they need to be smart.... I know I know this is a cheap answer, but I am all about cheap answers to problems today - and in my gameplay loop, seeing the caster "spit" this effect and moving before it expands into a cloud of hell... is pretty rewarding.

So I have a time point, on all clients they know when the effect begins, they know the maximal extent and they know the center of it....

What I am thinking about now is the client side only, so without any network traffic, an entity definition for the effect which the client has pre-loaded into some dictionary of effects to execute, and this contains a rate per millisecond from the start time and the effect system has to linear interpret along the line.

I am thinking about designing some form of easing curve authoring for the client effect system - and I'll likely reuse this in the animation system - whereby I can try different easing curves.

 The system interpreting along the line could be more than a lerp too, again that'll be down the line.

Replaying, reversing or otherwise on such a defined effect is going to be quite interesting as reversing the delta will allow me to contract it again.... Though time-line ordering is to be forwards chronologically only for my game play, that maybe a feature I want to play with in future.

What's the problem then?  Yeah, it sounds like I have a handle on what I want, except.... I've assumed all the way through my thinking that the effect is fixed, known and defined up front.... The problem?

I want to scale the effect with the power of the caster, and this is not known up front, sure I can just add a float and multiply by 0.5 for half power or anywhere along that scope, heck I could even scaled the enemies power by some easing function as well and combing the power function along that line with the rate of the effect.... So there are answers to be had.

My problem is randomness, when it's random, things look wrong, they don't feel right when playing them and the rewarding feeling I had from the fixed function gameplay doesn't turn up... It's in some fort of metaphysical uncanny valley which I can't quite explain doesn't feel right.

I will have to play about some I feel.... 

XVE: Making Meteors!!!

I've had a little bit of a roller coaster few weeks, I would recommend anyone feeling life taking them and rushing them to try and find a minute for yourself, take a breath and slowly exhale.

  

XVE: Modular Ship Building System

Modular Ship Building system.... Yeah, so I've played about with compute shaders and high res oceans for, well for too long, I do want my game to have a low-poly feel so I've returned to focus in that direction.

Today beginning my modular ship building system, I can build a ship to place into the play space out of discrete pieces.  Since I'm using an Entity Component System this is trivial, I just create the "ship" as a series of child entities of the one ship and each has a different model offset to just place the renderable where I want them.... Yes yes, lots of words, just go with me here.

I started with building out a Hull Model, then a bow and finally a stern, and set up a function to build a ship with a number of segments of hull capped with ... yes the bow and stern:

The result was extremely visually underwhelming:

However, it proves out four key piece of technology, first is my transform hierarchy code is working as expected the parent entity here positions all the sub-renderables.

The next is the entity creation utilities are working, with the components tagging bow and stern orienting the entity along the X axis as "Forwards".

Right in the middle is my new Obj loader and the vertex colour attributes; I've moved away from using a Texture map to look up the colour of a face, say from a texture like this:

I've moved to vertex colours, but may return to UV's and faces, we'll see when I reenable global lighting.

And the final piece of tech is my revamped ImGui display of all the entities in the scene; I'm looking at implementing a gimbal control for moving entities about more easily within a scene.  This leads to the next piece of tech I am going to look at which is a scene editor, I need more play space defined, so land masses, buildings, objective markers, a compass display and of course to be able to control these new ships.... Watch this space.