i'm working on a simple game project with libgdx and i need some help to make a random infinite world. After googling for hours i knew that many games use the "chunk theory" to generate an infinite map and also implement tiles. There are many things i don't understand... for example:
What is a tile? and a chunk?
How can i implement this "chunk theory" in a game?
Is this the best way to generate an infinite random map?
can someone answer my questions to make some clarifications in my mind?
Thanks in advance
Tile-based maps are maps, which are organized as a grid. A Tile is then a cell of this grid and objects are placed inside this Tile/cell and can't be placed between to cells. Think about Minecraft, every Block there is one Tile.
A chunk is a part of the map, containing many Tiles. It has a fixed size and is used to be able to load only part of an infinite map.
Imagine a map with a size of 1600*1600 Tiles. You won't be able to see all Tiles at once. Also you don't need to update the logic for the whole map, as it won't affect you anyway. So you split your map into little parts, so called chunks, which have a fixed size (for example 16*16).
Depending on your position, adjacent chunks are loaded and far chunks are unloaded. So if you move from south to nord, chunks in the nord are loaded, chunks in the south are unloaded.
I never implemented a chunk-system myself, so i can't tell you how to implement it, but i guess there are many tutorials out there.
This is not the way to generate infinite maps, but the way to store, load and work with huge maps. The generation is usualy done with some noise functions, but thats a different story.
Anyways i suggest you to start with something smaller and simpler. Rushing into to complex things will just discourage you.
Related
I've been looking for a robust method of pathfinding for a platformer based game I'm developing and A* looks like it's the best method available. I noticed there is a demo for the AStar implementation in Godot. However, it is written for a grid/tile based game and I'm having trouble adapting that to a platformer where the Y axis is limited by gravity.
I found a really good answer that describes how A* can be applied to platformers in Unity. My question is... Is it possible to use AStar in Godot to achieve the same thing described in the above answer? Is it possible this could be done better without using the built in AStar framework? What is a really simple example of how it would work (with or without AStar) in GDscript?
Though I have already posted a 100 point bounty (and it has expired), I would still be willing to post another 100 point bounty and award it, pending an answer to this question.
you could repurpose the Navigation2D node for platformer purposes. The picture below shows an example usage. The Navigation2D node makes it possible to navigate the shortest path between two point that lie within the combined navigation polygon (this is the union of all NavigationPolygonInstances).
You can use the get_simple_path method to get a vector2 array that describes the points your agent/character should try to reach (or get close to, by using some predefined margin) in sequence. Place each point in a queue, and move the character towards the different points by moving it horizontally. Whenever your agent's next point in the queue is too high up to reach, then you can make the agent jump.
I hope this makes sense!
The grey/dark-blue rectangles are platforms with collision whereas the green shapes are NavigationPolygonInstance nodes
This approach is by no means perfect. If you were to implement slopes into your game then the agent may jump up the slope instead of ascending it normally. It is also pretty tedious to create all the shapes needed.
A more robust solution would be to have a custom graph system that you could place in the scene and position its vertices. This opens up the possibility to make one-way paths and have certain edges/connections between vertices marked as "jumpable" only. This is a lot more work though if you can not find any such solution online.
I am trying to load a very complex set of GLTF models in AFRAME.
My problem is very simple; my goal is to try to load about 9 million of gltf models in a unique scene.
My idea was to combine different level of detail in GLTF models depending on the camera distance and also only load those gltfs which are visible by the camera. If not the problem is that the assets are loaded in memory and my browser gets finally hung due to memory consumption.
Is this possible in AFRAME?
With some attention to A-Frame best practices, you should be able to make a performant scene with tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of polygons. But it will not be possible to load millions of distinct glTF models simultaneously in A-Frame, or any WebGL renderer for that matter.
Assuming you just want to show as many as models possible, try to take advantage of certain special cases:
If you need to render many copies of the same model, you can use a technique called "instancing". Check out aframe-instancing for some example code on how to do that. Depending on the complexity of your model, you may be able to show thousands (but probably not millions) of copies at once.
If you're making something like an RPG — which needs many things in the world, but only a few are in sight at any given time — then you can be clever about dividing your world into zones, and only loading models for the current zone.
Both of these are non-trivial to implement, and beyond the scope of a Stack Overflow question. My suggestion would be to try to get started on your own, and when you run into trouble, post new questions with the minimum amount of code necessary to see what you're trying to do. You may also find the A-Frame Slack group to be useful.
http://app.geokone.net/ is an open source javascript app for generating shapes (if you can look at it, it's really fast, for 5 seconds, I'm sure you'll get the idea).
It's hard for me to go through it because it's a lot of code, what is the general idea?
also, I need those shapes as GameObject with polygon collider around them (anything from 0 to 20 of them on the screen at the same time, could be different shapes also), is it even possible with GL?
would GL help me? I think GL would be fast for just 1 shape or something (as it's using recursion), but for what I want, I think drawing them in real time to a texture, then using the texture as a sprite would be faster (as I can save the sprite for shapes that are the same), or maybe I should use a shader? any other method that you can think of?
and for the algorithm itself, what is the general idea?
You don't want to use GL, look into custom mesh generation with MeshFilter. It is required for the colliders anyway.
Meshes have to be updated just once and probably will be faster than any optimisation you proposed. You might need a shader to draw it, though.
As for the algorithm, I'm afraid you have to look into it yourself or hire someone for it. StackOverflow is for helping with issues, not doing the work for you. If you need a hint, look into basic fractals
See title. That's all I have to ask. The net doesn't have many succinct answers to this question. Please keep in mind stack vs heap. Explain as you would to a complete beginner. Just looking for the "why" not the "how".
edit
Are pointers a way to get large objects out of the stack?
When passing a huge object from one piece of your program to another to be worked on like an entire class for example or something with a large amount of data like an image or video passing every single bit of data would be very inefficient. Instead you can just pass a tiny little memory address (pointer) that the receiving part of your program can then use to get to the object to be worked on.
Aside from that huge aspect, they offer a lot of flexibility but I need more than a paragraph for that.
When you get into managed code like C# or Java EVERYTHING is done with pointers/references but it's all behind the scenes and you don't have to deal with them like you would in C++ or another similar language. But it's still crucial to understand how they work.
Edit in response to:
"why would I pass a large object around if I don't need to work on
it?"
You wouldn't. However; Correct me if I'm straying from what your asking but what you'll learn if you continue into Computer Science is that a piece of your program should be as simple as possible it should only do 1 thing. Commonly known as the Single Responsibility Principle this dictates that you will have many seemingly tiny parts of your program that will all work together to accomplish the over arching goal. That means that a lot of those tiny pieces are going to need to work on the same objects, the same data and use the same tools to get the job done. Lets look at a hypothetical.
You're coding a simple image editing application.You're going to need a cropping tool, a paint brush tool, a selection tool, and a re-size tool. Each of these tools are going to need their own place in your program (a class or more likely many classes that work together) and that class will have many smaller pieces (methods/functions and other things) that work together to accomplish the goal of that class. Every single one of these classes and methods is most likely going to need to look at or modify the image data. With a pointer you can provide them with a memory address instead of making an entire copy of the image. That way when one of the classes or methods makes a change to it you don't need to worry about managing all these copies and making sure they all get the same change.
It allows you to do pass-by-reference/shared data structures, which has two big features: it saves memory and CPU overhead by not making copies, and it provides for complex communication patterns by making changes to shared data.
In working on a shortest path algorithm across a network I would like to generate a picture of the network. I'd like to represent nodes (circles), links (lines), cost to traverse the link (number in the middle of the link line), and capacity of the link (number on the link line next to the node it represents) in the picture. Is there any library/software out there that would help to automate creating this picture?
I can do this manually in Visio or with some drawing application but I'd like to generate them from code as I change/tweak the network.
Sounds like a job for GraphViz , it generates graphs from a short text description file. I've used it to produce connected node graphs and I believe it should be possible to add link labels, as you require.
If you're using python, Nodebox draws pretty graphs.
One of the big problems in displaying networks like this is figuring out where to put the nodes on the display screen. If arranging nodes is logically simple given your network, then an off-the-shelf product is likely to suit your needs.
If the arrangements are much more complicated, you may have to accept a certain amount of manual intervention to get this to work with off-the-shelf stuff, or byte the bullet and program the whole thing yourself.
.NET is one choice, and once you've mastered the Graphics class it's easy to use and plenty fast for something like this. However, there are probably better languages/platforms than .NET for something graphics-oriented like this.
Update: .NET is much better for 2D graphics than I knew. The key is finding a fast workaround to the pitifully slow GetPixel() and SetPixel() methods in the Bitmap class. Once you can read and write individual pixels easily and quickly, you can do whatever you want as a programmer.
Did you by chance check out the R programming language? I'm not positive but I believe that you can make images and such out of graphs. r-project.org
There are a bunch of visualizations of various algorithms here: Algorithmics Animation Workshop