Post by Deleted on Jul 10, 2015 18:21:21 GMT
Update Time!
This time Anthony (Producer) has a look at one of the bigger challenges the team faced recently with combat development. Annah also showcases a few more bits of art & unit design.
Production - Anthony's Words
"After several months of intensive work, the result we reached with the Warbands pathfinding system is closer than ever to what we envisioned for the game. Let’s look back at the challenges we faced."
"As you already know, we really want to have fluid and responsive Warbands in the game. A pathfinding system already exists in Godus, but we needed to rewrite considerable parts of it to make it compliant with the combat system and our ambitions. "
"For example, we no longer only want your followers to access shrines or new lands to conquer, we want them to be able to reach pretty much any point of the map and react correctly to the sculpting you or the AI might do on the map. One thing we don’t want, is frustrate you because your Warbands did not reach a point, for no real reasons, resulting in a battle loss. Visually speaking, we want them to stay in formation as much as possible to convey a real sense of military discipline. Again, no matter what is happening on the map, you should feel like you’re controlling armies."
"There is still work left to do to reach our objective, but hopefully this gives you an idea about the kind of experience we want to create for you, and we hope you will love it."
Programming - Ryan's Words
Ryan previously mentioned about the AI Pathfinding in a previous update but at that stage the size of the task wasn't quite known.
"The pathfinding system, written by Dimitri, was designed for navigating followers from point A to B as the crow flies. Sometimes this can fail because of sculpting issues or invalid leashing. In Godus, followers adhere to a queue to allow a set amount of followers to move at any one time to increase performance."
"However, with our Combat Warbands, each member must have priority over this system to allow for fluid gameplay and a smooth combat experience. Each warband has it’s own navigation system object that calculates the paths that it is being ordered to move to. Given that Warbands can have many members, the navigation object must be aware of the states of each of its members, where they are in terms of the path laid out for them, if a member has come into any problems and ensuring they stay together along this dynamic world."
"To do this, I have had the assistance of Dimitri who knows the system best, he's worked with me to figure out any edge cases and issues that could arise from this. We have had to do some significant work on this to allow the Warband to be more intuitive when it comes to navigation."
"For example, if a Warband has been told to move to a specific position but that position is in the water, we will travel as close as we can and then cancel the move order and await further instructions or attack anything within our range. We want players to feel like they can safely send a Warband to a position even if its illegal and they’ll try and work something out."
Art & Design - Mustering Fields
We thought it might be a good idea for Annah to show off a little of what she has been working on but before that it's probably best Konrad actually details what Mustering Fields actually are..
"Mustering fields were developed with the aim of solving two distinct problems with the way warbands are generated from citadels. Firstly we needed a stable space for a warband to appear. The ever changing terrain of Godus caused a lot of problems for the navigation system when a spot chosen for a warband to generate became invalid during the process, such as a new abode appearing in their chosen spot. Without it you were never quite sure where a warband would try to get to as it spawned."
"Secondly, having individual soldiers stream out of the citadel as the warband was generating took a long time especially with larger warbands. During this time before the warband got into formation, all the soldiers were vulnerable and could not be commanded. They could all be easily mowed down 1 by 1 by enemy warbands without being able to respond. This problem was especially prominent in large bases where a soldier would have to travel quite far before finding a large enough space to generate their initial formation."
"Having mustering fields part of citadels ensures warbands always have a valid location to form and allows us to generate the entire warband instantly right next to the citadel without it looking like they popped out of thin air en mass."
steamcommunity.com/app/232810/discussions/0/537402115081159375/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As a reminder to our good friend Colin, Digital Jam wants a word with you, just quote his post in the new Combat thread since you had the courtesy of locking the prior one without bothering to read said post:
Digital Jam: I'd like to think that they're regrouping. The updates, over the past few weeks, have shown one thing very clearly. The skeleton crew of junior dev's, is simply not up to the task.
Hopefully the reaction, from long-time community members, to the almost complete lack of progress this year, has driven home the fact that 22Cans needs to make massive changes to how they're making the game....
Midnight Bacon (Colin): How so? The updates have shown the combat progress from the view of those working on it daily and the feedback has been mostly positive in regards to the recent Steam Announcements
Digital Jam: First of all, when you reply to something I have written, please do me the courtesy of including what you're replying to, in your quote. That way you can't take it out of context and make up a reply that makes 22Cans sound good. You're not Jeremy Kyle and I'm not Russell Brand, so picking and choosing what you like, to give favorable/unfavorable context, isn't something to which we really need to stoop here, is it?
I have done you the favor of including both the paragraphs you were replying to, so that I can both point out the discrepancy in your argument and so that others can see what it is you're trying to do, by miss-quoting and replying out of context. Also, I think it's worth pointing out, that your tenure thus far, has been massively trite and condescending, considering your audience, which I may have to remind you, is mainly made up of people over 30, from the IT industry and therefore probably a good deal smarter than yourself, so you may want to act accordingly and not talk so much rubbish, because it won't fly here, I can assure you.
Now, to take you to task about both your reply to me and the below reply to Totally Tim.
Firstly, I talked about the reaction "from long-time community members," which has been terrible. That's just a fact. None of the supposed fans who commented positively to the recent updates, have ever been part of the long-time community, on these or the pro boards, in the past 20+ months.
The reaction from the people who are here, on a regular basis, has been bad, because so little has been done this year and what has been done, has been amateurish at best and even that's being kind. You may have heard that the Universim, ridiculed the Godus story mode, when they released their pre-alpha/proof of concept, by putting a little clickable story around the map..... And it was both better written, more engaging, funnier and more intriguing, coming from a staff of none-native English speakers, making a sly joke, than it was by someone who took weeks to write, supposedly with the aid of a professional writer.
Now we hear that combat, which existed two years ago, as a mini-game, can't be part of the main game, because 'err, too many icons on screen and we don't really know what a game designer might do to fix such an insurmountable problem.' So apparently that's going to be a mini-game again.... Just like nobody asked for.
So essentially, since the release of the story, the "team" has managed to model and animate a few archers and put together a weird formation mechanic, which seems to not belong in the game, whatsoever. So yeah..... Not a good year, so far, regardless of how low your standards are.
Neeeeext!
totallytim: Are you trolling or just delusional?
Midnight Bacon: Nope.
For example - The Art Progress Update received 28 upvotes to 3 downvotes and numerous comments of praise. And out of the 12 comments posted - 8 we're positive.
Digital Jam: You may want to not point out, how appallingly scraped together, your up-votes are. Drawing attention to the fact that every single one of the updates on the combat, has received exactly 28 up-votes, looks extremely dodgy, as does the fact that suddenly, out of nowhere, all these people who have never commented on the game before, have this collective urge to voice boisterous encouragement.
steamcommunity.com/app/232810/discussions/0/530645446316280193/#p2
This time Anthony (Producer) has a look at one of the bigger challenges the team faced recently with combat development. Annah also showcases a few more bits of art & unit design.
Production - Anthony's Words
"After several months of intensive work, the result we reached with the Warbands pathfinding system is closer than ever to what we envisioned for the game. Let’s look back at the challenges we faced."
"As you already know, we really want to have fluid and responsive Warbands in the game. A pathfinding system already exists in Godus, but we needed to rewrite considerable parts of it to make it compliant with the combat system and our ambitions. "
"For example, we no longer only want your followers to access shrines or new lands to conquer, we want them to be able to reach pretty much any point of the map and react correctly to the sculpting you or the AI might do on the map. One thing we don’t want, is frustrate you because your Warbands did not reach a point, for no real reasons, resulting in a battle loss. Visually speaking, we want them to stay in formation as much as possible to convey a real sense of military discipline. Again, no matter what is happening on the map, you should feel like you’re controlling armies."
"There is still work left to do to reach our objective, but hopefully this gives you an idea about the kind of experience we want to create for you, and we hope you will love it."
Programming - Ryan's Words
Ryan previously mentioned about the AI Pathfinding in a previous update but at that stage the size of the task wasn't quite known.
"The pathfinding system, written by Dimitri, was designed for navigating followers from point A to B as the crow flies. Sometimes this can fail because of sculpting issues or invalid leashing. In Godus, followers adhere to a queue to allow a set amount of followers to move at any one time to increase performance."
"However, with our Combat Warbands, each member must have priority over this system to allow for fluid gameplay and a smooth combat experience. Each warband has it’s own navigation system object that calculates the paths that it is being ordered to move to. Given that Warbands can have many members, the navigation object must be aware of the states of each of its members, where they are in terms of the path laid out for them, if a member has come into any problems and ensuring they stay together along this dynamic world."
"To do this, I have had the assistance of Dimitri who knows the system best, he's worked with me to figure out any edge cases and issues that could arise from this. We have had to do some significant work on this to allow the Warband to be more intuitive when it comes to navigation."
"For example, if a Warband has been told to move to a specific position but that position is in the water, we will travel as close as we can and then cancel the move order and await further instructions or attack anything within our range. We want players to feel like they can safely send a Warband to a position even if its illegal and they’ll try and work something out."
Art & Design - Mustering Fields
We thought it might be a good idea for Annah to show off a little of what she has been working on but before that it's probably best Konrad actually details what Mustering Fields actually are..
"Mustering fields were developed with the aim of solving two distinct problems with the way warbands are generated from citadels. Firstly we needed a stable space for a warband to appear. The ever changing terrain of Godus caused a lot of problems for the navigation system when a spot chosen for a warband to generate became invalid during the process, such as a new abode appearing in their chosen spot. Without it you were never quite sure where a warband would try to get to as it spawned."
"Secondly, having individual soldiers stream out of the citadel as the warband was generating took a long time especially with larger warbands. During this time before the warband got into formation, all the soldiers were vulnerable and could not be commanded. They could all be easily mowed down 1 by 1 by enemy warbands without being able to respond. This problem was especially prominent in large bases where a soldier would have to travel quite far before finding a large enough space to generate their initial formation."
"Having mustering fields part of citadels ensures warbands always have a valid location to form and allows us to generate the entire warband instantly right next to the citadel without it looking like they popped out of thin air en mass."
steamcommunity.com/app/232810/discussions/0/537402115081159375/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As a reminder to our good friend Colin, Digital Jam wants a word with you, just quote his post in the new Combat thread since you had the courtesy of locking the prior one without bothering to read said post:
Digital Jam: I'd like to think that they're regrouping. The updates, over the past few weeks, have shown one thing very clearly. The skeleton crew of junior dev's, is simply not up to the task.
Hopefully the reaction, from long-time community members, to the almost complete lack of progress this year, has driven home the fact that 22Cans needs to make massive changes to how they're making the game....
Midnight Bacon (Colin): How so? The updates have shown the combat progress from the view of those working on it daily and the feedback has been mostly positive in regards to the recent Steam Announcements
Digital Jam: First of all, when you reply to something I have written, please do me the courtesy of including what you're replying to, in your quote. That way you can't take it out of context and make up a reply that makes 22Cans sound good. You're not Jeremy Kyle and I'm not Russell Brand, so picking and choosing what you like, to give favorable/unfavorable context, isn't something to which we really need to stoop here, is it?
I have done you the favor of including both the paragraphs you were replying to, so that I can both point out the discrepancy in your argument and so that others can see what it is you're trying to do, by miss-quoting and replying out of context. Also, I think it's worth pointing out, that your tenure thus far, has been massively trite and condescending, considering your audience, which I may have to remind you, is mainly made up of people over 30, from the IT industry and therefore probably a good deal smarter than yourself, so you may want to act accordingly and not talk so much rubbish, because it won't fly here, I can assure you.
Now, to take you to task about both your reply to me and the below reply to Totally Tim.
Firstly, I talked about the reaction "from long-time community members," which has been terrible. That's just a fact. None of the supposed fans who commented positively to the recent updates, have ever been part of the long-time community, on these or the pro boards, in the past 20+ months.
The reaction from the people who are here, on a regular basis, has been bad, because so little has been done this year and what has been done, has been amateurish at best and even that's being kind. You may have heard that the Universim, ridiculed the Godus story mode, when they released their pre-alpha/proof of concept, by putting a little clickable story around the map..... And it was both better written, more engaging, funnier and more intriguing, coming from a staff of none-native English speakers, making a sly joke, than it was by someone who took weeks to write, supposedly with the aid of a professional writer.
Now we hear that combat, which existed two years ago, as a mini-game, can't be part of the main game, because 'err, too many icons on screen and we don't really know what a game designer might do to fix such an insurmountable problem.' So apparently that's going to be a mini-game again.... Just like nobody asked for.
So essentially, since the release of the story, the "team" has managed to model and animate a few archers and put together a weird formation mechanic, which seems to not belong in the game, whatsoever. So yeah..... Not a good year, so far, regardless of how low your standards are.
Neeeeext!
totallytim: Are you trolling or just delusional?
Midnight Bacon: Nope.
For example - The Art Progress Update received 28 upvotes to 3 downvotes and numerous comments of praise. And out of the 12 comments posted - 8 we're positive.
Digital Jam: You may want to not point out, how appallingly scraped together, your up-votes are. Drawing attention to the fact that every single one of the updates on the combat, has received exactly 28 up-votes, looks extremely dodgy, as does the fact that suddenly, out of nowhere, all these people who have never commented on the game before, have this collective urge to voice boisterous encouragement.
steamcommunity.com/app/232810/discussions/0/530645446316280193/#p2
