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Updates from MarZ: After the finalization of the environments for about 20 levels (see devlog#6), we now have the first playable level.

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Updates from MarZ: After the finalization of the environments for about 20 levels (see devlog#6), we now have the first playable level. For sure it isn’t balanced at all and content is still in development status, but it is playable and that is already damn cool. Have a look:


Probably one of the biggest improvement is our new crowd behavior for the enemies. So time to write a few words about it. During a playtest I had really bad performances as soon as I reached about 100 units. First I thought I could make some modifications to our pathfinding system, but it didn’t really help a lot. We used a third party plugin and therefore it can be annoying to change code without knowing if you are actually breaking stuff or not. After all there weren’t any decided improvements in sight.

So the solution clearly was: flocking behavior. Well there are lot of papers and tutorials on how flocking actually works. So I won’t go into deeper explanation. If you are interested check out those links: tutsplus.com ; vergenet.net. It is mostly used for birds or fish swarms and consists of three behaviors: alignment, separation and cohesion. So we basically ripped our pathfinding system out and implemented a flocking system with waypoints. And finally our zombie crowd walks without causing performance issues. Here is an early test gif I’ve made: (those are 800 units at about 40 FPS)

15-12-18_MR-img1


Now it’s time to take a little break with our beloved family and friends. We wish you all merry christmas, happy holidays and a happy new year. See you next year.

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OJeskulke
OJeskulke

Thanks for the interesting links about flocking, nice to hear that this can help with performance problems.

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RedeemerEngaged
RedeemerEngaged

Yeah flocking is pretty cool and fun to toy with. The ingame footage looks good too ;).

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