Edengrall News

Made all the 320+ windows, these are prefabs instead of being part of the building mesh, so they can animated and are much better for optimization. Still have to make a model for doors and the tall windows.



We added all the rooms and put them in a graph, my brother made a simple algorithm to create connections between the rooms based on proximity, while it worked on 80% of the cases, about 20% of the connections are wrong and I will have to fix it manually... this might take a while.



Once the connections are fixed and assigned proper weights for better pathing I will set the ownership of the rooms and the NPCs will finally be able to understand where they are and how to move through the city properly.

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.