Edengrall News

I have finished working on zones and regions, all the city rooms now have ownership assigned (default is “City of Edengrall” if there is no direct owner), the player will start owning a room in the Tavern, and will be able to live there for free in the first month.

I also finished the graph that links every room to each other for pathfinding purposes and all navmeshes are also done.

There are two characters I want to finish before release, Yukari (Bunnygirl) the owner of the Café and Lumina (Mothgirl) the owner of the flower/seeds shop, I will prioritize shopkeepers before other characters so the player will have more people to buy/sell to.

My brother is making progress on the AI, this week he spent making sure the progress of tasks and the current NPC objects are properly saved and loaded, and now he is working on the responsibility system, it will work together with the needs system to give characters tasks and objectives on their daily life.

Responsibilities are tasks and jobs, these can be shared between characters, running a shop is a responsibility, which can have more than one character assigned to, if one character is unavailable the other can do the tasks linked to that responsibility.

Needs are personal and take the highest priority, things like eating and sleeping.

I will try to finish Yukari in two weeks and Lumina in the next two, the deadline is very close now and we need a test build soon.

Remaking the navmeshes manually has allowed us to create preferential pathing, our navmeshes now have differential weights on the roads and paths making NPC pathing algorithms to prefer them.



The full navmesh is not done yet, as the navmesh pieces from the buildings are not fully integrated with the terrain navmeshes yet, but it should be done this week. The region/room system has also been improved to work on the new navmesh and this should solve our problems with pathfinding algorithms giving up on long travels by splitting the journey into several smaller pieces.

On the npc interaction front my brother enabled the old npc interaction system he had started, and is now improving it to be good enough for launch, it needs an UI overhaul, which I will work on after I finish the navmesh.

After wasting the last two weeks trying several auto-generated navmeshes and their pathing algorithms we couldn't find a single one that worked, the worst one being Unity's own, but I can't really blame the tool, as we found out navmeshes are not supposed to be used on such huge maps like ours.

Luckily my brother found a solution, following the saying "want something done right? Do it yourself!" That is right... the only way to get the pathfinding done is to manually make all the navmeshes ourselves... this means the work falls down to me, but well at least it worked on our tests, so this problem should finally be fixed.

I will also have to rework the room connections and configurations later since we decided to stop using that system until the pathfinding started working properly.

I took the region map and split in smaller meshes, working with several small navmeshes seems to do the trick



I also split the road into another mesh, so we can add a preferential path for the NPCs to walk on.

Unfortunately we didn`t get much done this week, asides from the pathfinding complications we both got the big-coof-that-should-not-be-named and it knocked us both down for a whole day, we have been good enough to work since then, but with blocked/runny noses and slight headaches, should take about 3 more days to fully recover at this rate.

Next week I will be doing the navmeshes for the buildings, since it has to be done manually...

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.