Edengrall News

I made meshes for all regions adjacent to Edengrall, the new area total is 1.5km x 1.5km



The new meshes are not converted into biomes yet, so they are not technically ingame, we have to optimize the grass and test the impact of the new zones before adding them, if they are not in the game by the December release they will be on the first major patch.



If you look carefully you will notice different shades of green in some grassland areas, those are different soil types, some hard to reach places will have better soil, so making a farm directly outside the town is no longer the most effective, you can choose many different places for your farm, each will have advantages and disadvantages.



The water also has different biomes, beach, deep ocean and reef waters will affect the types of fish when we add fishing



Here the total planned area, the whole island will be 5km x 5km, so right now we only have 9% of the map done.

On the AI part my brother is finishing the algorithms required for the NPCs to move between rooms taking in consideration doors and the ownership of rooms, so NPCs won’t move through a room they don’t own or open doors they don’t have keys for.

My brother made a debug tool to see what the AI is doing in real time, this will make the development much easier, he coded a bunch of needs for testing and will make the AI attempt to fulfill those needs. Will be similar to something you see in games like Rimworld, but they will be able to interact with the player too.

On the terrain front I have finished two new areas (the leftmost ones) and I am now making the bamboo forest area that will be north of the town, it takes about 3 days per region, we want to have 9 of them total for release, the final game will have 100.

We cannot guarantee that the 8 new areas will appear on the Early Access release, as we need to optimize the grass system for such huge areas, but we will try.



The new areas have special biome variants, the area around the river and ponds now have irrigated grasslands, the minimum water on the soil is higher, so there is less requirement for manual irrigation, some areas have fertile soil, where the soil nutrients recover faster and some have better pastures, when we add animals they will prefer those areas, so there will be several choices for the player farm or farms as there will be no limit to the amount of farms you can build.

Planned Island below

Finished the rooms and all the reforms in the city, now replacing the old mesh of the city in the main scene, I do have to replace the materials and scripts manually, so it takes a while.



After the basic AI is implemented I will start filling several XML files assigning which room belongs to who, which are public and what are their functions.

We decided to not go with a crappy hardcoded AI, but with the system we intend to have in the release.

Our AI will work on a needs and tasks system instead of rigid schedules.

Each NPC will have different needs, preferences and personality traits and moods that affect the priorities of their tasks.

A lazy character that is not feeling well might decide to skip work if their economic situation is not at risk, a hard worker that is enjoying work might extend their shift, the personality traits of the NPCs can be accessed and modded through XML files.

We also want to make sure the NPCs react to the player actions, specially when the player builds something, being productive in Edengrall is a very good thing, and hard workers gain respect with most citizens without needing to interact with them as long as they observe your progress.

The relationships with the player are split in up to 3 different bars.

Friendship: Improves with positive interactions with the player.

Respect: Improves upon observing the player progress, being irresponsible (overworking until you fall Ill) may cause loss of respect), helping with community projects also increase respect.

Love: Capped by both friendship and respect, only marriage candidates can earn Love towards the player, each eligible bachelorette will earn Love in slightly different ways.

Gifting will work differently than in most farming sims. Edengrall citizens have a culture of returning favors, if you hand out a gift the receiver will be indebted to you and will feel pressured to return a gift of equal value, for this reason handing out gifts is not something done by strangers, citizens will only accept gifts if you are already close friends and not more than once per week.

Citizens going through hard times will be more likely to accept gifts of charity and in those cases you will be able to let them know there is no need to return the favor.

The map reforms are done, materials fixed, all buildings optimized and proper collision and LOD meshes split, now we are adapting the city for the AI, I am creating simple polygons to indicate for the AI where every room is, so the NPCs will be able to find the correct room or zone to do whatever they need.



Meanwhile my brother is setting up the Navmeshes, this is what the NPCs use to know where they can move and how to reach the place they need to go, we did a quick test with 100 entities moving through the city and they managed to move through properly without any drops to FPS



We will probably have simplified npcs moving through the rooms with test schedules by next week.

Now that we have released the demo we are finally free to do the overhauls we need for the December release, we updated Unity to the LTS (Long Term Support) version 2020.3 which has the most stable version of the features we are using, a lot of stuff broke, but the game should be running again next week, maybe the grass issue will be fixed by this change.

While my brother has been fixing broken scripts I have been editing the Edengrall map, I have changed every single window in the map removing the glass part from the top which will be part of the window object later for better optimization, this change alone plus some more minor optimizations lowered the total amount of triangles on the city from 900k to 640k! That will make the city run a lot better and allow for the placement of the remaining furniture without significant FPS drops even if the furniture prefabs are not fully optimized yet.



We are also working on getting a map working (hotkey M), it will be essential when the NPCs leave the main square and start actually moving around.



Not much else to report this week.