Devlog - July 10th 2022

Art demo v2 & Runtime navigation mesh baking

This week’s focus was on getting the next demo out to testers. I managed to do that and contacted everyone interested. If I missed you for some reasons or you decide that you want to join for this round of testing please reach out. Besides finishing the demo I also did some work related to the various social media accounts. Finally, I started working on the new implementation for runtime navigation handling. For now this is only for the zombies but will be usable for other AI such as wildlife in the future. Instead of baking a navigation mesh strictly around the player whenever the player moves a certain distance, I opted for an approach that utilizes the new world generation pipeline. The new system generates a bunch of small navigation meshes in a grid for each terrain around the player up to a certain distance. This way I don’t have to rebake as often as before. Rebaking will now only be required if the terrain was modified which currently only happens when the terrain is aligned to roads or buildings. If the player moves into new chunks the navigation meshes for them will also automatically be baked after the world for those chunks has been generated and populated. This new approach does require connections between the different navigation meshes to allow AI to traverse from one to another. This is working in part already and will be expanded and tested a lot next week. I hope to be able to finish the first working version for this new implementation next week and hopefully manage to get a good amount of testing in too. If everything goes well I may even be able to start implementing the new zombie models I have purchased a while ago during the Unreal marketplace sale. I’m pretty excited to finally bring back the zombies into the game. If I don’t run into any major issues they will already be included in the next demo for testing. They would be in a very early state of implementation but that should be sufficient to do some crucial performance benchmarking on AI and navigation before adding more logic to them.

Notable tasks this week:

• Finished and sent out next demo to testers
• Worked on the various social media presences and did a few posts throughout the week
• Started working on the new implementation for runtime navigation mesh baking

Wishlist on Steam

Join the Discord

That’s all I got this week. I hope you are all doing well. Stay safe out there and I’ll see you next week.