Kenshi - A free roaming squad based RPG (Trailer!)

[buckED]

Hey there.
It's been quiet around kenshi lately. Sure you are burried with work all over.
How's your team doing, gathered some people around you already?

I'm thinking bodypart targeting should be random for now, otherwise everyone will just target the same vital area all the time. The exception being if you specifically order your characters to disable and not kill.

I don't know whether character advancement will play a role in your game, but why not make it dependent on skill? The better a swordsman a character is, the more likely he will hit specific, critical areas. One could even go as far as creating different combat-styles. One character prefers targeting the legs or the arms first, others are striving for that fatal blow straight on.
That would need quite some balancing work of course or else it might happen that these latter ones kill all their opponents with a single hit, or do not hit them at all.

[Captain_Deathbeard]

Hi buck-ed. What happened was my girlfriend left me in september, and for some reason I lost the will to program since then. By sheer co-incidence with your post I have just got back into it, so now I'm programming like a banhsee once again. So you can expect more updates coming soon.

As for my team they left a while before that, as I expected they would, but I thought I would be left with one or two truly devoted guys. Free teams are not easy to manage, and the amount of time you can waste recruiting and briefing team members who do 2 drawings and then leave, I might as well do it myself. I can keep it to a minimum anyway with my programmers gift of procedural generation.

So yeah, as negative as that all sounds, I'm pumped! Updates soon!

[Captain_Deathbeard]

I basically want it so that high-level swordsmen can kill in one or two cuts, but beginners just progressively maim you (but mainly because their clumsy cuts do less damage). I suppose if critical areas just got more likey as a certain skill developed, that would work. Could have its own associated skill.

[akiraoni]

Umm.... I'm still interested. I've emailed you twice, and sent you a link to my older work. I'm just finishing my first semester at college, and I've been trying to become involved with your project for months. All I need is a document to let me know what your looking for (as in feudal japanese or futuristic azn like samurai jack)

[Captain_Deathbeard]

I don't think I have had a mail from you, I have pm'ed you my address, try it again with some examples of your work and I'll take a look at it.

[Captain_Deathbeard]

Been a while since I updated this thread, so I thought I'd show some more progress. I have mainly been working on art, there's now a male model, and they're both textured finally. Also working now on the final world map, and different terrain types.

On top of that I hope to release it this year and do what Mount&blade did, offer an early alpha version for a low price.

[Virion]

looks cool

[KungFooMasta]

Nice pics! Although you chose a very sandy environment, and there are no footprints in the sand, or sinking..

[trnrez]

Looks pretty interesting. Keep up the work.

[buckED]

looking good.

I especially like the pants. Your artistic skills can not be that bad after all.

[Nargil]

How do you cut the characters in pieces ? Precreated pieces or dynamic ?

[Captain_Deathbeard]

Not sure what you mean about cutting characters into pieces, but you can do severed limbs by scaling the appropriate bones down to zero, then a duplicate character with the inverse bones zeroed to make the severed limb. Something clever needs to be done to make the stump red though, a premade texture overlay perhaps, but I'd need hundreds of texture layers them to do what I want to do.

[Nargil]

Quite smart. Thank you for the answer.

[Captain_Deathbeard]

A few new screens and video. I am planning to make the first bare-bones release on 1st of October, though there won't be much to it yet, and it may be delayed a little.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU6m6MdWr0M

[Gigabeat]

Good job.
I especially love your character models.
So "post-apocalyptic"

[mkultra333]

This looks really fun. I like the bleak desert setting, and the sword fighting and acculative damage theme. Only thing, as one poster has already said, it would be good if you had some footprints in that sand, because when I think of people wandering in deserts I automatically imagine their footprints. Could make it easier for fighters to find each other too in such a large environment.

[efeX]

This is looking REAL good, keep up the good work!

[kraj0t]

I need to write this reply just to say

WOW

[Captain_Deathbeard]

Still working on it full time. There is an early early pre-alpha demo on my forum too.









The pathfinding works entirely on the background thread and is kind of hierarchical, so one click and your character can find his way from one end of the map to the other, even if the map is 20km across, without a touch on the frame rate. It also takes into account slope levels, so heavily-equipped characters have to avoid steep slopes and take the long way around, while agile ones can climb up cliffs. It also handles dynamic placing of buildings because its all done on the fly.

[Praetor]

Looks really cool. The new stuff breaking up the terrain really polishes the look.

[rogerdv]

I was wondering about what happened this project a few days ago! It is good to see that you are back to work and inspiring the rest of us.

[Assaf Raman]

Nice work.

[jacmoe]

Finally, this gem is starting to look good!
I realise - or maybe I should say: I am able to realise - the awesome amount of work required before there's anything 'to show'.

[Dredogol]

Looks great!
Gota take a look at the pre-alpha later.

The pathfinding works entirely on the background thread and is kind of hierarchical, so one click and your character can find his way from one end of the map to the other, even if the map is 20km across, without a touch on the frame rate. It also takes into account slope levels, so heavily-equipped characters have to avoid steep slopes and take the long way around, while agile ones can climb up cliffs. It also handles dynamic placing of buildings because its all done on the fly.

I've been trying to figure out a good way to do path-finding on my own for a while, but to no success.

Do you just take the height-map data and determine if an area can be accessed (climbed) or not?
If so, for ONLY terrain, this is easy implement.
However, once you start adding buildings, I'm a little puzzled on how you do PF.
(Assuming buildings are NOT loaded as part of the map/terrain/height-map), do you calculate the height by using the bounding box of each building?

The reason I'm asking, is because I can never seem to do proper PF with entities on my terrain.
IE. On a flat terrain, want to move to other side of building along path... how do you go about doing this?
If the map was all grids, this would be easy with A*, but I have no idea how to manipulate the mesh / height-map files to even get to this point.
If I know how to convert the raw data into some kind of data structure, I can do the PF fairly easy... and say grids X, Y, Z cannot be accessed because an object is in the way.
Could someone (anyone) please give me some tips on how to do this conversion process?

Lastly, you said the PF is done in a background thread.
May I ask how you went about this task, and how your thread hierarchy (order) looks like?

I've been doing everything in 1 thread, which I know, is simple, but not good for performance.

[Praetor]

Search "navigational meshes"