All through the summer I've been slowly working with the 3D human models, and with a tool to make 2D sprites from the models. Today I have a first test running in Ancient Savo. It uses a lot of the same logic which operates the sheep models - and looks like it adds a little random rotation to every sprite, just to make a flock of sheep appear less monotonous. Also, seems like at some point I have accidentally broken the rounded tile edges. Well, there is still a lot of work to get this all together.
Picture album:
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For generating rivers the random map generator uses A* pathfinding. Reusing that it was relatively easy to make the family members to find a path from the cabin to the task location. Technically speaking the movement animation works, and each morning we see the sprite traveling a path from home to work.
But there is a problem which made me feel unsure at the earlier stages of the game development. Every time I heard someone suggesting "show them family members on the map" I felt like it is going to be one sped-up mess of dashing sprites. As the game tries to simulate the flow of time so that we can actually see kids growing up to start homesteads of their own, so I designed the simulation and visual representation to have 24 hours as the smallest unit of time. Now, let's do some calculations;
one tile size is 10m x 10m.
Assuming walking speed of 6 km / hour we get ten minutes per kilometre. 100 m per minute. So, to cross one tile it would take 1/10 of a minute, which is 6 seconds.
So, somehow I need to find a way to visualize timescales of 24 hours and 6 seconds, so that they both make sense. I'm not yet sure how to do that. But, solving problems is one of the reasons I like programming =)
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