Greetings, Captain!
Line Rendering:
After a few attempts at trying to implement line rendering on the map, for routes or markers of any kind, an unfortunate discovery that tech that we are familiar with, provided by engine and/or extensions, were just too buggy or uncontrollable for our liking. We had to create a custom mesh based solution to make things look exactly the way we want, such as having access to fine tuning of bevel operations to corners. It took some isolated testing to refine but when it was dropped into the project it met our requirements perfectly. Here is a debug render of a row of points with random offset.
Route Generation:
In the last entry we shared an algorithmic method that involved generating a few thousands random routes and selecting the best scored 50 or so to use in game. To reduce cost and increase yield at the same time we added a post process operation to the routes that detects bases that are a 10-15 kilometers away yet weren't selected in the generation process. These bases are planted into the related route's base order and the routes have their pathfinding and scoring reevaluated. This is only done for the best routes.
Selection of Routes:
In the legacy Campaign design there was no need for any routes as the AI would "simply" assign an idle supply party from base to base according to a cost function that processed supply values and distances to find the best pairs for the party to transfer supply. The supply party would then keep asking the AI director on the next move every time it arrived somewhere.
This proved to be difficult to balance in terms of parameters due to the unpredictability of mass supply transfers draining one base and overflowing another, causing some parts of a faction's territory to lock up and be vulnerable to attacks. There were ways around problems like this but only through adding new parameters, complicating the system and making it more difficult to balance while also making it more difficult for a player to understand and thus make custom Campaign difficulties with it.
What we've been doing for the past couple of weeks was to design supply as its own, more or less isolated system with the persistence required to have a well functioning campaign. Now that are able to have some nicely generated routes, it's time they're utilized by the AI.
Every two weeks or so the AI factions select routes for their supply spawns to follow. The process for selecting these is quite simple. For example, to select 3 out of the 50 best routes out of thousands, one can run a few hundred random selections out of those 50 routes, then identify which trio visit the highest number of unique bases. According to our experiments this process commonly results in all the bases of a faction to be visited through those selected 3 routes. The randomness factor allows the map to warp into something else every now and then, while still maintaining structure and stability.
UI Design:
The increased quality of the map gave inspiration to redesign some the UI elements on the map. You may notice some changes in the gifs below. We already have more to show, however, it's best we present and explain them at once when they all come together. So for now, enjoy the teasers!
Map Visual:
Another thing we noticed after staring at this map for long periods of time is the lack of detail on land. Thankfully the map artisan had already provided layers for topographical details and rivers, though we haven't had the time to import them yet. Great measures in optimization was necessary to display the existing high resolution data. Recent developments have gotten us closer to have everything look nice and efficient so we should be able to import the extra layers soon.
Goals for the Next Cycle:
This was a pretty detailed rundown of the progress on the supply and development system, and you may have noticed that we've started writing shorter Developer's Diaries to make them more readable and digestable. Therefore, we are postponing the exposition on the resource system, hopefully to the next cycle. The supply system is almost complete, but there is still testing to be done, so we're giving it a bit more time before moving on.
That will be all, Captain!
T.T.