Another couple Tiny Steps

Well it has been another two weeks and I am getting better at keeping the "Two-Three" weeks update schedule.  

Even so the "I have to get something done for showing" is something that is always in the back of my mind, its getting easier and easier. 

Anyway the progress is getting forward and I am finally getting key features implemented. 

One of the things that I worked on was the pathfinding System where the single target System was fairly slow while mass targeting was faster.

Turns out that my Pathfinding was a mix of Dijkstra & A-Star Pathfinding. 

It is a lot more expensive on larger checks but its more precise since it goes all possible ways until all nodes were checked and then it weren't back

To find the most optimal path to go. So trading Speed&Ram for accuracy.

So I turned that into actual AStar which is much faster but less accurate in the optimal path.

On top of that I started a simple implementation of Hierarchical Pathfinding. It is not finished yet but mainly for the reason that I am not happy with the implementation of it yet. 

Mainly for the reason that the implementation is losing a lot of accuracy and the use-case is not even close to be there yet. The use-case is mainly for ships that travel between the land.

The next thing I started thinking about the minimap that the game should have. 

While doing that I wanted to do some test implementation of it.

But I quickly decided against that for the main reason that I had the idea to do a seed previewer for Chunk Pregenerator which includes a minimap for two cases before the world was loaded and after it was loaded. 

It was a good exercise, teaching me a lot of things of how to do things.

Also including a bug in java that I am not sure how I am going to use it in my advantage.

It has mainly something to do with an improved file reading/writing System won't releasing files unless a "Unreliable" function is being called. (Garbage Collection)

After the Chunk Pregen feature was done I had not much time left in these two weeks, since it took around 6-8 days to implement, test and release.

So I decided to make one of the bigger features that I wanted to have for a long time. Entity Raycasting & UI elements showing up if a Entity was clicked on.

First the Raycasting, it was a simple and dirty implementation since I all other things I tried were either off and confusing or straight up not working when I tried to use them.

So I went for a TileBased Entity selection System. (It finds the tile you point at and then selects the first entity it finds on the Tile).

It is not the best implementation, but it is right now working and allowing me to do other things while I learn about that.

Next thing is the UI Elements showing up when you clicked for example on a Tree a "Test" Text shows up. 

That worked somewhat flawlessly. Besides some stupid mistakes and some tiny bugs that showed up it ran smooth and easy.

So yeah that's the progress I made so far.

I hope that I can do the next post will be done in 1-2 weeks. 

Anyway thanks for reading.

Speiger.