The Great Gif Exchange, Week 7 (+SURPRISE)

Here's my .Gif for week 7.

I got the ProceduralMeshComponent from the wiki to work.

I didn't quite figure out how to get reliable collisions (weird things where chunks spawned in the editor didn't line up etc.).

I will have to redo my texturing scheme, because Marching Cubes doesn't work with just UV coordinates. I'm thinking I need to use triplanar texturing, so I'm going to have to figure out how to do that.

I couldn't for the life of me get movement to work how I wanted. I really need to drain some time into that so that I can actually have something game-y.

BONUS! World Tree Design Doc

Here's my cut-and-pasted notes on how I am going to design the world representation for AI: For the large scale AI, everything is in a tree. Something like this:

• world

  • region

    • town

      • building

        • person

          • merchant

            • item

              • food

                • bread

                  • steal
                  • buy
                  • pay 10 money
                  • trade

              • building materials

            • job

              • money

                • get money

          • cannibalism

            • food

      • building

        • person

          • blacksmith

            • item
            • job
            • employ

          • cannibalism

            • food

Every node has difficulty associated with it, which can be relative to the agent searching the tree (e.g. thieves are open to stealing, cannibals don't care about eating people, species tend to do things certain ways etc.).

By representing the entire problem like this, it becomes so much simpler. Just fill in all the nodes, plug in A*, build actions from path, and you're done (obviously, this is still going to be fucking hard). Agents could think about the future by having surplus as an additional heuristic on nodes, so they'll buy more food than they need in order to not get hungry all the time.

Anyways, I'm super excited about this, because it breaks down the problem really well. It'll take work, but I want to make it so that voxel data isn't required for low LOD AI simulation. The AI would only use the tree for their position/actions. This would be huge in terms of memory and performance savings. However, converting from low LOD to high LOD when the player gets near could be difficult (e.g. if the AI "built" something in low LOD, it may not have been possible to build that thing in high LOD).