tree chopping.

[MAXDDARK]

after I saw the video release which was great I want to make a comment and ask a question

it seems that the tree chopper standing to far away from the tree, could you make him closer ?

and how it's gonna work , will it be realistic like in AOE that you need to cut the tree that he would fall down first and then "extract" wood from it , or will it be like in warcraft that you can "extract" wood from it while it still standing up ?

P.S

just came up with an idea.

what if you choose 2 workers to chop trees, wouldn't it be great that in this cease (with 2 workers) they had a saw (after upgrade) , instead of an axe and could work twice as fast ?

just a thought.

Edited February 25, 2007 by MAXDDARK

[Belisarivs]

If those two choppers worked twice as fast, two-men saw won't be such an upgrade

[Aeros]

In short, I wish there was some way of showing how exactly the dynamics of a game have to convene in order to make something look convincing to the degree where it hides the mechanics behind it that make it work. But alas, all I can say is that adjusting the bounding radius of the unit so that it's animation syncs and appears close enough to the tree so that the axe appears to hit the tree and then sync an audio sample so you hear a "thunk" is one of the easier things to fix, considering at it's core the tree, the axe, and the thunk are just a countless mesh of trillions of zeros and ones condensing at the speed of light into patterns in microscopic webs of silicon, the inputs and outputs of which have to be perfectly and coherently defined, calculated, read, and understood by well over a couple hundred thousand lines of programming code, or else so much as one comma in the wrong place will make the whole thing illegible and grind to a hault faster than you can even blink, let alone say "wtf!"

...

We would very much like it for trees to fall when they are chopped down and visibly appear to diminish as you extract wood from them but alas, there are more important things that consume our attention than that sort of detail. For whatever reason, the mechanics didn't sync on the first time, or perhaps the thickness of a tree trunk wasn't anticipated at the time when we were coding the mechanics of woodcutter's collision boundaries that tell the game how close that unit can get to another unit, such as for example a tree. But the good news is that There will be time later on to polish these details If anything right now, the bounding circles of a soldier is a similar issue, but one that is a little harder to balance. How much space between units should we allow so as to find the right balance where combat is very close quartered, thick and dense, but you don't get clipping problems with units overlapping. We can't make them so small as to have a unit stand so close to another that his arm passes through the back of a horse, or completely through an enemy soldier's shield, yet if we put too much room between them we will miss the density of close quarter combat we are trying to portray, and probably end up with something even less realistic like units being so far apart that their swords won't reach the other unit when they attack (similar to the woodchoppers).

But like I said, at its core its a simple solution, alot simpler than what it took to make it work in the first place. The equations and the math and the rules are all there, its just a matter of trial and error to find the value for the radius that works best.

Edited February 26, 2007 by CheeZy

[MAXDDARK]

If those two choppers worked twice as fast, two-men saw won't be such an upgrade

twice as fast * 2 man = 4 as fast

or if it's too much, 150% as fast (of those 2 man) could do the trick.

CheeZy : I figured out it's just a matter of balance , trial and error.

nothing you can't handle.

and the tree animation falling down, it's a simple one...

I'm not close to being a programmer and this math scares the @#$% out of me, but I understand that THIS (man radius) is not SO complicated as there are things FAR harder then this.

P.S

from your reply I understand that you also notice that the roman solders in the back fighting air...same problem.

nothing you can't handle.

[Aeros]

Oh, ofcourse I wasn't being clever or giving you some wit by saying it like that, just ofcourse.. filling out some of the details. But yes correct, its one of the smaller things that is so easy to fix that its not a big deal, we did the best we can for the video without spending nights with no sleep looking for the right value to hit the balance we need.

[DeadHead]

I find it really annoying the trial and error part for finding the right distance etc... it just takes a lot of time to get it perfect for something that small...