This is my first blog in a short series about game engine development. In this specific blog, I will demonstrate the pathfinding algorithm of my game. There are currently three stages to it (there will be much more when it is in a complete state). The precomputation, the actual pathfinding and the smoothing of the path request.
In this relatively long video, I dive into the details. I have put significant effort to share all this with you! I hope you like it, if so give it a thumbs up and subscribe. Without further ado, enjoy my lengthy explanation!
Most of the content is there for test purposes even the font itself is a test one. It will be changed soon. I agree it does not look good at all, but I wanted to make sure that my text box widgets will work consistently with both proportional and mono spaced fonts. This by itself requires a separate blog.
If you are still with me, I want to share that there are a lot of issues in this presentation. Please keep in mind that this software is very very deep in development and things change pretty quickly.
For example the memory footprint of the precomputed paths is unnecessarily big (over 1gb), because I forgot to get rid of the local unsuccessful attempts to find tile paths between chunks’ exits , so you can take the numbers in the memory profiler with a grain of salt. They should really be much smaller(there is no memory compression algo yet). I will keep you updated on the numbers pretty soon.
Also a careful observer might have seen that there are problems with the depth management during the demo. Sometimes the minimap disappeared or a given window went behind the game world. Well, this will be fixed soon. I will separate the rendering of the actual game from that of the UI into two separate framebuffers. This will give me additional benefits like post-processing effects on the rendered world. However, the depth is not completely broken, it can be seen that if you take the game world out of consideration and you only consider all the windows and widgets. They had correct depth set. Even when the window is half transparent the rendering is consistent with no dropped or clipped geometry. Also there is perfect blending without a depth buffer. These are some pretty cool side effects of the rendering method used(Dual Depth Peeling). I will talk about it in greater detail sometime soon.
Thank you for your time! I am glad that you reached to the end of the blog. I will be really happy to answer most of your questions. You can write to me either at enyoienev at gmail dot com or post a comment below. Criticism is also accepted, I do not mind at all. Any feedback is welcomed!
I am also trying to add a mailing list to this blog. Stay tuned! For more information visit a week later. Hopefully I will be able to set up a working mailing list and you will be notified for my blogs.
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