Development News #10 - Animals and Algorithms

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Arrakis
 
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Development News #10 - Animals and Algorithms

Post by Arrakis » 25 Jul 2016, 14:49

Hey guys,

Welcome to this week’s dev news! There’s lots of reworking some older mechanics on top of everything else so we thought we’d elaborate on some the new mechanics you can look forward to.

After we released LiF:YO, we decided we’d like to completely rework animal behavior mechanics. Our goal was to achieve better code clarity, extensibility, and an easier way to modify parameters in realtime.

The new pathfinding algorithm removes the old manual implementation, and instead takes advantage of the well-known recast/detour library. This allows us to provide walkable surfaces (Navigation Meshes), not only on the ground, but on the stairs, buildings - everything with proper collision geometry. It’s also fully tunable: maximum angle, impassable area size near walls, etc.

Image

After we had taken care of the new pathfinding, new animals (and the native NPCs in the future) would still be lacking good behavior implementation and proper spawn logic. Therefore, after many discussions, we decided to move forward with the ‘behavior tree’ approach. This technique showed great adjustability and was really clear to understand.

Image

This screenshot shows an approximate behaviour tree for predatory animals, such as bears, boars and wolves.

Spawn logic was the last feature to add for our overall animal AI improvements. We originally divided the whole territory into regions.

256 regions in one terrain
256 x 9 regions in one server

However, now civilization rates are taken into account, it reduces the chance for animals to spawn so we’ve made the animals appear more randomly in their respective biomes (wolves on forest soil for example) and the spawning algorithm is more adjustable.

At the moment, these new algorithms are present in Beta Wave #0 of the MMO, and are currently being thoroughly tested and continuously improved.

Thanks for reading this week’s dev news, join us next Friday for more!

Please note that we are aware of, and hard at work on, issues that may have affected some users since the latest update. The team are diligently working on fixes and apologize if anyone is affected by these changes

- The team


Heinrich_von_Leipa
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Re: Development News #10 - Animals and Algorithms

Post by Heinrich_von_Leipa » 25 Jul 2016, 23:54

I'm all but a pro in all this coding phrases so.. tell me:
Does that new pathfinding method system mean that animals now can no longer run through solid objects (walls, etc.) and thus, for instance, we could now finally "catch" animals by luring them into a fenced area and closing the gate?

Aside of that, great news, guys! It sounds much better than before, especially I do love the new algorythm that spawns animals not randomly but at certain natural areas where you'd "sort of" find them in RL. So if you want to hunt a wolf, you'd need to go to a dense forest, and so on. Great job, guys!

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Karabas
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Re: Development News #10 - Animals and Algorithms

Post by Karabas » 26 Jul 2016, 15:11

cool news =) i pray for it will not delay the known bugz fixing =)
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Arrakis
 
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Re: Development News #10 - Animals and Algorithms

Post by Arrakis » 26 Jul 2016, 15:25

Richard_Smith wrote:...we could now finally "catch" animals by luring them into a fenced area and closing the gate?

Developer of this system said that it should work, but looks like we didn't try it that way.

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Donatelobg
 
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Re: Development News #10 - Animals and Algorithms

Post by Donatelobg » 26 Jul 2016, 15:33

I'm sorry about maybe the stupid question but nothing is said about animals pulling carts are they close to be finished or you are working on another thing at the moment and will we see them in the your own or in the mmo ?

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Arrakis
 
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Re: Development News #10 - Animals and Algorithms

Post by Arrakis » 26 Jul 2016, 16:08

Donatelobg wrote:I'm sorry about maybe the stupid question but nothing is said about animals pulling carts are they close to be finished or you are working on another thing at the moment and will we see them in the your own or in the mmo ?

This feature requires a lot of work, so it will be implemented sometime later.

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Boundless
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Re: Development News #10 - Animals and Algorithms

Post by Boundless » 27 Jul 2016, 08:15

So, what's the time of wave#1?


Mylesperhour
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Re: Development News #10 - Animals and Algorithms

Post by Mylesperhour » 27 Jul 2016, 19:40

Sounds like a really good system in development. Can't wait to see this implemented.

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