Monday, August 16th, 2010
This week, Ian and I take on the uncanny valley, erotic roleplay (in WoW), Rayman’s sales figures and a whole vast host of your listener questions. Join us!
Check out links from the show on our official Google Reader page.
Thursday, August 12th, 2010
We’ve added some significant features to make planning easier, and we’re looking for as much feedback as possible from you guys before the weekend – check it out.
Monday, August 9th, 2010
I’m rather pleased with myself this morning.
The pathfinding in FS has always been atrocious – experienced players pretty much have to use shift all the time to bypass it. It’s a pain in the ass. Here’s a great example of it going wrong:
The reason pathfinding sucks so much is that my algorithm for it is terrible – it splits the levels up into a grid, each square about the size of a unit. It then checks each square for obstacles. It’s a really innaccurate representation of the level.
This weekend I was reading up on advanced pathfinding stuff, and considering using some kind of Navmesh with movement polygons. Then I was hit by a flash of inspiration – the only thing that matters in FS is corners. If you ever want to make a path in FS, you only ever use the corners to get there – the only points I need in my nav-graph are the corners! Here’s my code for identifying the corners in action:
As you’ll know if you’ve written A* before, the algorithm needs to know how all the navigation nodes are connected. Here’s the same level with that info:
The nav-graph for this level is pretty simple – here’s a more normal one:
Yikes. Lucky computers are fast at this sort of thing! Here’s the same level that the initial algorithm got wrong, but with the new algo I knocked up this morning:
Perfect. You guys can play around with this pathfinding right now – the download is here.
Lots more UI improvements to come.
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010
Server up – was a screw up at our ISP, apologies to everyone effected.
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010
Hey guys. Our ISP is currently down – I’m trying to get through to fix it.
Ian
Sunday, August 1st, 2010
Hey guys.
I have returned from honeymoon. My wedding day was truly wonderful – much better than I could possibly have imagined. The honeymoon (we went to Lake Garda, Florence, and Chianti in Italy) was very relaxing and I feel refreshed and ready to fix the UI! So I shall do that.
I read some books while away, here’s a quick summary of what I thought.
The Star Fraction by Ken Mcleoud: Good, if a bit rambling and boring at the end.
The Stone Canal by Ken Mcleoud: Extremely good – well reccomended
Fairyland by someone: Pretty interesting but it’s dated a bit.
Empire of Light by Gary Gibson: Really, really terrible. The trilogy started off promisingly with Stealing Light, but the second and third books are just awful.
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