Thank you thank you thank you
Will you make Slugcat slightly vulnerable to its effects as well?
Maybe? A complete blindness might be a bit too much, but something is not out of the question.
Really, it just looks like a rip off of Sweet Dee from Always Sunny.
Well, at least we wear our inspirations on the sleeve! You could tell straight away!
So are those fireflies there to make you nervous because you can't in a split second tell them from a bird's eye? Because that's pretty brilliant
That is art by accident - the flies were made before we started thinking about the birds, but when was working with the birds I noticed it as well and did play along with it a bit. Pretty representative for the process we have actually - as we're both designers and devs we can freely pick up stuff like that when we come across it.
I'm curious about how their pack behavior will be different from the yellow lizard pack. They have no antennas, so I expect less coordination. They probably just charge and pile up on you instead of carefully flanking.
I'm also curious about how they interact with lizards. Do they eat them like a prey, or just scare away like a competitor?
Yeah, they basically don't coordinate. These guys are no geniuses, they rely more on snapping constantly and hope that somthing will end up between their jaws. Their interaction with any other creature is just snapping at them a lot, haha!
you seem so experienced now programming AI on ragdolls like these bio mechanic things. I'm so curious about how you programmed it, i guess there is A* for pathfinding ? but how does the ragdoll find its balance and learn how to walk, some genetic algorythm ?
i would just say they look a bit sloppy when they climb a high platform, the limbs get a little mixed together, but it's still extremeley cool!
Yep, A*! The trick is actually that it's
not a ragdoll, so it doesn't need to find balance etc. To clarify - if I was using the "animate a ragdoll" method, I would start out with a thing that was limp on the ground, but behaving correctly in terms of physics. Then I'd have to make forces pull at this thing, and I'd have to worry about a million things such as balance.
Instead I work backwards - I start out with a pretty typical "game" movement, a thing that just swishes through the air following the A*. Then I put legs on it, then I make the legs seek contact with the ground. Then I make it so that when the legs are not in contact with the ground, the body is affected by a bit of gravity. Basically I start out with a movement that has nothing to do with physical correctness but which works, and then I add cosmetic details that makes it appear more physically correct. But it's all fake - the legs of these birds for example doesn't consist of the same "matter" as their bodies but are just 2D vectors with no weight etc.
A lot of the behaviors look really sloppy! That's why it's cool to be in this fantasy world with these fantasy creatures. If I were to animate a human looking figure like this I wouldn't get away with it for 2 seconds, but as no-one knows what these creatures are supposed to move like their sloppy scrambling might pass for correct.
Reminds me of sligs from the Oddworld games. I played the hell out of those as a kid.
Oh yeah I love oddworld! Never owned one myself but I played them at a friend's. Good stuff!
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