Implementing forces in Unit Motion (HELP WANTED)

[Atrik]

1 hour ago, nifa said:

The ship's movement looks really natural.

My favorite too  Hopefully it can be a good starting point to make naval battles very different then land battles.

1 hour ago, nifa said:

(on the elephant attack too late, on the catapult impact too early?). I think it's nice and I wanna encourage anyone who is able to test it

Right.

 

Edited 14 hours ago by Atrik

[guerringuerrin]

10 minutes ago, nifa said:

Too bad it's not possible to make a mod, unfortunately I don't have it compiled.

Having people who can compile is important for testing many things. I can help you with that if you want to do it some day

[Atrik]

2 hours ago, nifa said:

The timing in the other two videos might be not 100 percent on point (on the elephant attack too late, on the catapult impact too early?)

 

Better?

Also another demo about cavalry movement now :

[Thalatta]

11 hours ago, Atrik said:

Already ships not going through each other is an astronomical improvement (although realistically, for the more direct impacts the ram would perforate the other ship and reversing would be needed to separate them). I hope the same could be implemented for land units, making their movements more natural and their tactics more relevant.

[Atrik]

4 hours ago, Thalatta said:

although realistically, for the more direct impacts the ram would perforate the other ship and reversing would be needed to separate them). I hope the same could be implemented for land units, making their movements more natural and their tactics more relevant.

You are such a gigantic troll 
But I'll bump on it still, and give some nerdy details.

The collisions between units are not indeed like solid bodies that are impossible to overlap, even with this PR, this will remain true for most units. It's more a spring-like push that tries to make units keep distance to each others. This pushing just use a distance-to-center repulsion force.

What's introduced here for boats and elephants is a different stronger pushing and that actually take the unit's shape into account. This is why on the video you see that the hulls act like actual solid bodies. However simulating this, is ~x1.5 time costlier then the simple radial spring pushing. So because that, for small units, the difference in visible behavior would be minor, better go with the simple pushing, and use the better one only for big units that get the most benefits from it.

A fun fact is that before this PR, all units were treated the same, so you did had still this radial-pushing for boats (the collisions were spring-like and only a small circle at the center of the boat was even acting as the hitbox) but it was still much bigger then for, say infantry.
To detect if units were colliding, the map had a grid that allowed each unit to search a limited area where it might be actually colliding with other units. This grid size had to be proportional to the largest pushing unit of the game : boats - who's pushing effects where questionable anyway.
Even if you played on mainland map with no ships whatsoever, the grid was sized to work for boats too. And your unit had to check their distance with much more other units they needed to.
So you can say that the lag you experience on mainland, was partially due to ships.

This along a few other optimizations with the pushing and more resilient obstruction handling, make the PR a performance improvement for common scenarios (yey!).