Coding Dev Journal – Adding New Collision

Today we’d like to highlight some of the polishing we’ve been doing. If you played in Alpha or in the Sneak Peek you’d have noticed some pathfinding issues when rounding corners, objects, pits, etc. while dungeon delving. We’ve gone back to this and really reworked and added in a lot of smoothing.

Going further back, if you played in the Sneak Peek you’d have noticed that there wasn’t even WASD movement at all. When we implemented the alternative movement options, we didn’t have quite enough time to go in and make it work perfectly.

We’re using a grid-based system for pathfinding (obviously, right?) but with the addition of WASD movement, which requires more precise checks and faster reaction on the client-side, quite a lot of issues arose. As an example, when you press “W” to move forward you may get forced into entering a square that isn’t directly in front of you, which then leads to what is displayed as that ugly “shaking” movement.

Given this issue, we could have gone two ways; one would have been to make our poor level designers go into every level and add in more colliders manually. So it was obviously deemed necessary for us to go in and work out a better way to procedurally create better colliders that would fit the pathfinding system. Looking at this picture, you can see how the pathfinding system utilizes a grid to determine what is a possible and impossible as a move. So in this new system, colliders are generated for walls and other obstacles so that the WASD movement will better adapt to player inputs. This has smoothed the movement greatly and also helps with the reaction time and precision in movement.

Sure, it’s been a lot of work to add in, especially since it stemmed from major player feedback; but considering how many of you wanted this and prefer WASD as opposed to mouse-only, we felt it was worth the effort. This is your voice in action, dear CoS fans! Keep ‘em coming! That’s part of what our Forum is for, so take a moment to drop by, sometime!

- City of Steam Dev Team