voxel game

[laggyluk]

Working on a 'job dispatching' system. Idle workers wonder around and pick up jobs that fit their skill set.
So far they know only how to dig holes

[Ñuño Martínez]

An idea: voxeled based "lemmings" game. Unfortunatelly it may be too dificult to manage...

[laggyluk]

yeah, like efficient 3d pathfinding ;0 time to figure it out

[SilverWarior]

yeah, like efficient 3d pathfinding ;0 time to figure it out

I strongly recomend implementing some heuristic pathfinding algorithm.
While plain old A* can be easily implemented for 3D worlds due to it being node based it can become quite slow when number of nodes is large.
But if you do implement it using heuristic approach you can make it a lot faster.
And another suggestion. If you haven't been thinking about multithreading now is the time.
I have seen many games which are being limited due to singlethreaded implementation and not verry eficient pathfinding algorithms.

[laggyluk]

Yeah, I got the a* sort of working in 3d. I've read about jump point search algorithm being major improvement to a* however stuff I've read didn't state if it's also suitable for 3d grids (guess so but not sure).
My game's architecture has a central 'message pump' or sth that is used to separate all the major subsystems so it should work with multithreading. When actor needs a path calculated it adds that 'demand' to the queue rather then call the 'path finder' directly.

[laggyluk]

looks like this

[SilverWarior]

Nice!
One question thou:
Do you use increased weight values when units are moving uphil?
If you take a look at first units path you see that somwhere in the middle of the map units path goes upwards on the hill and then even backway a litle.
Now this could be caused by lack of increased weight when going uphil since destination was much higher (heuristic estimate distance of those bocks to goal was actually closer) or some error in pathfinding algorithm implementation (wrong node selected for moving forward).