Time to show something off.
Recently I worked on the fluid simulation in Gnoblins. Until now fluids in Gnoblins were merely a visual effect, but under the hood it was already a working simulation. To utilize it completely I needed to introduce the ability to swim. So, gnoblins and other creatures are now able to swim now. When swimming, each creature will be affected by an effect. Most creature will be slowed down and get exhausted faster, but there will be although creatures, which will get faster, get healed or get damaged.
I called it fluid simulation because it is not very good suited to represent water in a realistic way. For this task the simulation is not fast and detailed enough, but for slow moving fluids like lava and slime it works great.
An other feature I have added recently is the addition of environment agents, how I like to call them. Basically it is an AI which manipulates the environment. Currently it is able to change a lot of things, but I will present this in an other post. For now it is only important, that with the help of these environment agents the fluid is able to interact with static environment objects like torches. So, when watching the video take a look at the torches when the fluid level rises.
So, why add a fluid simulation to Gnoblins ? Well, I think that it smooths the way for some interesting gameplay. For one you are able to control the fluids by using doors or better floodgates. Doors will only slow it down, whereas floodgates will stop them completely. An other effect is, that fluids will damage or destroy your furniture and limit the abilities of your minions or even hurt them. On the other way, you could use it to fend off enemies.
Eventually I want to talk about what we are working on currently. First off, I have updated two additional tilesets for the dungeon, the sewer and castle/fortress tileset. I will show them off in a future post, I think that one of the next levels will be a sewer level utilizing some slimy sewage water :-) An other task is the addition of more creatures. Currently there are 6 different kind of creatures, each with 2-4 variations, which are in the state of getting finalized. Creatures are the most costly element of Gnoblins. You need to model, texture, animate, add some behavior and add some variation to them. There's a reason that many of the 100-200 people working on a AAA title are artists.
There is some interesting stuff in the pipeline I will show off in future posts, so stay tuned .
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I had a hard time understanding what was going on in the video. At first I thought the brownish soil was the water, and that it was evaporating (first scene).
I guess it's because the water fills up from the bottom of the "tile", not from the side where it comes from. So when the water begins to appear, it looks more like the soil is evaporating.
I understood when I saw the second scene with hole in the ground.
It's pretty, I like the way the water level rises. But it really feels like the water is coming from under the ground, and not that it's coming from an adjacent tile. But I guess simulating real fluid movement in channels/holes like this would be very resource intensive.
Maybe you could modify the tile relief so that there is no isolated puddle, and that the bottom of a tile connects to its neighbour's bottom (I you you know what I mean ?)
Yes, it looks like the water is rising from the ground. The reason is, that the water simulation is quite rough to grant enough performance on slower systems. I've tried different things to improve the visualisation, but sofar no attempt was satisfying enough. I will most likely revisit the visualation in the future, but real fluid simulation are quite resource hungry and eventually it is just one game feature of many :-)