When thinking about games I want to make, I often thing of "obvious" short cuts, time savers, and techniques that are either never used, rarely used, or used in a different way.
I'm an idiot. So I want to say these "obvious" tricks either don't work, or there's a good reason why they aren't done on a regular basis. That said, there are cases of civilizations not seeing seemingly obvious uses for their tech. Using wheels just for toys instead of a labour saving tool. So, I thought I'd ask the smart people of the db, see what you think, is there something I'm missing?
These examples are for a FPS game I'm thinking of making, but they also apply to many other genres.
-Why not design map tools to work on a per room basis?
I'm going to pull some numbers out my arse here, but in a given environment, I'd guess 80%-90% of rooms are similar. In an office, it's mostly hallways and cubicles, in a city, you're mostly going to be dealing with streets and houses of similar design. With this in mind, instead of having to build each room by hand, why not have generic, pre-fab rooms that slot together? Kind of like the mapmaker in Timesplitters 2. You can then go in, change details and move furniture around.
-Why not brute force the nav grid at compile time?
One of the more tedious parts of mapping is setting nav grids and doing points of interest. Again, 90% of the time, it's obvious. Instead of having to place a gun turret, and a point of interest saying "hey, this is a turret.", instead have the mapping tool go "oh, there's a turret here. I'll just add a point-of-interest-turret-node here." Now, there is going to have to be some manual nav grid stuff, but again, an automated system would make the map take longer to compile after major changes, but I think the time saved mapping might make it worth it? Maybe? I've seen stuff like Omni-bot and Sven Co-op experiment with flood fill/plane based nav systems, but I don't know if it ever panned out.
Youtu.be
-Generic skeleton animation?
Here's another huge time saver I've seen used in some games, but not others. Design a generic humanoid skeleton, and share multiple animations among enemies, player models, etc. Even if you need unique animations, you can spend extra time making a high end rig with lots of features, allowing you to create more animations, better, quicker, because you aren't having to build a new rig and animate it each time for every humanoid. This also applies to weapons which I'll get into next...
-Generic weapon animation?
I thought of code based weapon animations, but thinking about it, it might be more trouble than it's worth. However, with some forward panning, many guns of the same type can share a rig and thus gain the benefits mentioned above. For example, a bolt action rifle is a bolt action rifle, and given how bolt action rifles tend to be very similar in terms of operation and placement of parts, you can reuse rigs and animations. The only games I know that really do this is Fallout 3/New Vegas, and I think Left 4 Dead 2 does it with shotguns, but don't quote me on that.
Those are just some of the things on my mind right now, let me know what you think, especially if there's something obvious I'm missing.
Thanks.
