TaleSpire Dev Log 70

Evening folks,

I’ve been messing around with fog of war and whilst it’s not there yet there has been progress.

The task right now if fixing this issue. The short version of the problem is that we have a data-structure that describes where has be uncovered (we call this a creature’s ‘memory’) and we have to sample it to see if a tile is visible. We can’t just sample in the center as maybe a tile is multiple units wide and only the corner has been revealed. We also can’t just sample at the center of each sub-tile as we get situations like this

    ||
    ||
____|| _____
__A__||__B__|

Where A is a wall and floor tile and B is just a floor tile. If B has been revealed then we have to see the wall (otherwise users get confused as to if it’s the end of the board or if it’s a hidden tile). This means sampling slightly outside of the bounding box of the tile. However this still can cause issues, such as the one linked above.

I played around with a few more schemes but today swapped it out with a mechanism that does a breadth first search of all the nodes within a bounds in the creature’s ‘memory’. This has a more expensive worst case than the other approaches, but the tests were seeming to show that to take enough samples for a good result we would be paying a pretty high cost anyway. The creature memory is stored in a quadtree so in many cases the search can succeed early as we don’t have to search the full depth to find a populated cell.

I haven’t got anything more today so I’ll bail now and give ya more news soon.

Peace