There’s also the case of injured hearthlings potentially spending days at a time recovering, especially in the early game before the herbalist/cleric can heal them quickly.
It’s not just beds though, the solutions implemented for beds should also work when the hearthlings sit down to eat, or when they’re simply congregating in the dining hall after eating. It also means that players will be able to place fire pits indoors without being punished with hearthlings feeling cramped.
I agree, in most situations there’s no need to worry about a hearthling spending a couple of minutes next to a wall; but the idea of these suggested improvements is to eliminate the “my hearthlings are upset because of where they’re milling around, and there’s very little I can do about it” situation.
Perhaps the solution to the sleep/eat corner conundrum is simpler; I know when you’re sitting down your real life personal space shrinks, perhaps the radians shrink when they’re eating in a chair. And perhaps when they sleep it disappears altogether? Just ideas.
I’d say make the Heartjlings detect what surface is near them, so the AI will say something like…
“if a object is touching the detection ray, shrink polygon accordingly, if object is a building, add 50% length to that ray’s shortened length with no additional collision past the object, *added length does not get longer than the max distance”
If this is possible, that will make the hearthlings feel more comfortable in a building compared to a cave of the same size
This is definitely a viable alternative… in fact, I’d say it’s a more practical option which still gives the intended effect.
As much as I’d like hearthlings to feel safe behind solid walls, I realise that option is very dev-intensive to implement; I would certainly understand if they went with the simpler alternative since it works in 75% of the same situations.
Im not sure about this one. If I’m in a very small room which feels unformtable, it’s harder to sleep in that room in my opinion. At least for some that’s the case. ^^
I think the easiest way to solve the problem of being next to a wall or corner is to just try to expand the personal space in the opposite direction. That way the hearthling still require the same amount of open space along any axis, but they don’t have to be in the center of that open space.
Checking if you’re in a closed off room, the size of it and it’s content might be done with the navigation mesh. It should already have doors marked out. Checking if a part of the nav mesh is part of a closed off room shouldn’t be too difficult and only need to be done when the nav mesh is updated. Parts of the nav mesh that are part of the same room can point to the same room object, describing the size, content and value of the room.
Best wishes to Yang and Doug on their new jobs and thanks for what you’ve done for this game.
I highly doubt that Riot had anything to do with them leaving (at least not in the sense of getting rid of them). People get new jobs for a lot of reasons. New experiences, higher salary, closer to home and so on. The team have been expanding, so Riot still have interest in the game and even if they would be an evil company that only care about money, getting rid of the main sound guy and one of the programmers with the most experience of actually making games is not cost effective.
I just finished a new version of the personal space algorithm so that being in the corner of a room or along a wall will be the same as standing in the center of the room. It’s actually very similar to what @Agon describes. We just offset the the sampling box in the direction away from the walls.