Dev Blog #30 - A boat, dynamic water and more... news - StaudSoft's Synthetic World

Boat

We added a boat. It can be crafted by the player when he has enough wood and iron. The boat can be collected again. And you can push it to in order to bring it into the water:

There is no motor yet. We will add one soon.

Dynamic Water

The water is finally working. There was a problem with air bubbles underwater. But in fact our debugging tool was faulty not the water algorithm!

And of course as you can see in the video: Water can be collected with a bucket and it can be placed again in the landscape.

Red Deer

We also continued our work on the red deer. Check out the idle and the walk animation:

Walk:

Idle:

Wolf

And did we showed you the walk animation of our wolf? It looks cool:

Motion capture

I tried to load 300MB of motion capture data in the game. This was a little bit overkill. But nevertheless we will use mocap data.

Animation System (2D Motion Blending)

As you saw last time our engine support 1D animation blending. This means that when the fish is swimming at a certain speed the animations for slow swimming and fast swimming are blended to match a the target speed. This allows smooth transistion between the animations. To also take into account the turn speed of the fish we added 2D motion blending via delaunay triangulation. A video will follow soon!

Artificial Intelligence

And last but not least we really coded a lot regarding the AI:

• Behavior Tree
• Goal Driven AI System
• Serialization of the AI State (this means that when you shutdown the game and load it again the enemies will remember you!)
• New enemy detection algorithms

Even if this does not sound very much it was in fact the biggest change in the game engine in this update. But this of course can't be visualized in a video or in an image. When we have the working monsters will show them you.

Misc

• Added new icons (for water, lamp)
• Improved rendering speed of the models
• Improved the quality of the main shadow map
• Improved the water physic
• Changed the way the physic engine treats mass. The objects will now fall faster and more realistical.
• Improved loading speed of the game
• Improved the loading speed of the textures. And we also decreased the memory footprint.
• Added new sand texture
• Improved the contrast of the gravel texture
• Changed the neutronium texture
• Updated the position of the tools when the player holds them
• Updated the normal vectors of certain materials
• Tested the flash light and the lamp
• Added a boat recipe

What is next?

Perhaps you have noticed that we changed a little bit the direction of our development. We made it because we know that you (the players) would like to have an update. So we will upload a new release as soon as possible.