How to go on?

as many of you probably know, i'm developing a hexen like action/rpg-fps. i've implemented the gameplay basics like collision handling, items, an inventory, character attributes, levelups, enemy ai and quests. currently, we are somewhere between 2 and 7 people actively and passively(^^) developing the game and creating models, items, quests, network support and everything else.



i'm pretty confident we'll make it to a final release, but there are a few steps yet to take.

they are:

  • pathfinding. while already solved for randomly placed nodes in an abstract n-dimensional space (my testcase), i have yet to place waypoints inside the models created with milkshape. preferrably, i'd like to call a method for this instead of "hey mr. level designer. add waypoints manually". did anyone here ever try to make his ai understand building like structures? it somehow has to understand where it can go, which triangles are walls, which can be moved (doors, elevators) and which ones are at the bottom and can be walked on.
  • lighting. there's a problem at the inside of our dungeons again - every game out there evaluated a lightmap based on where the lights are and which points they can reach. does jme offer anything like this?
  • bsp. i'd prefer not rendering 1/4 of the whole map when being inside the dungeon and only seeing a few walls. what should i do?

For pathfinding you could sample player movement. Whenever the player moves, you check if there is AI node for that position. If there is no, you place one, then connect it to last node where the player was. This method works even if the AI don't know anything about walls, steps, doors, etc. It just requires that the environment behaves the same for players and AI.

Hi !



I’am also interested in dynamicly  building path finding … and perhaps rendering only a small part of the scene could be made by using MomokoFan’s occlusion checked queue ?  http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/jmeforum/index.php?topic=6214.0



:slight_smile:

For dungeons, I would suggest making them a different GameState, (unless you can see the exterior through many windows). And then just perform some gate-loading routine for it. If you have only a limited number of windows, you can still have this, and do a RTT of the exterior scene and paste it in the window, and still get the benefit of high FPS.