Sometimes we must admit if something goes awry. In our last content update we tried to do a lot of new things and we may have bit off more than we could chew at once. Our aim was always to provide content as polished as humanly (or rather Indie-ly) possible, but as many of you may know, A-tech is slowly 2 years old. When we’ve started developing, many of today's templates and standards didn’t really exist. At that time smooth locomotion wasn’t really a thing, and we just started with some very basic behavior and went with it.
Ah the good old days of swarm mode
Later “revolutionary” features like moving on angled surfaces and on multiple levels of navigation mesh was implemented. Let me explain the later for you. Navigation mesh basically defines the area where you can move around. It’s not really that simple but let’s stay with this.
The green stuff you see is the NavMesh
What you can move over however is a really different topic. Here is when the collision of the objects come into play. Collision is defined by the shape of the objects and a lot of other parameters.
The collision view of the same level
A lot of the problems attributed to this could be solved by very high resolution shapes. However everything you can step on and shoot has to be calculated by the engine’s physics so higher definition surfaces => more calculations => less FPS.
You could reply “Come on, other games have solved this problem!” Sure they did. We should do too, on that we agree. The problem as I mentioned before, is that we’ve started from very very far away, and we never had time to properly upgrade our navigation system to today’s standards. And since this is the first case we actually came across this problem it takes some time to fix it. We basically have to rewrite our whole locomotion system, and for a small indie studio that is a nightmare scenario. The new system is probably going to break a ton of things, which will need to be tested and fixed and tested again. We are working on it, but for now we must ask for your patience.
A thousand thanks for your support,
Norbert (Makrangoncias)
Game and Level designer