Updating/ bugfixing navigation system and UI.

Hey there,

i wanted to share some of the progress i’ve made on the game over the last three weeks. Although i’m streaming most of the development on twitch, it’s sometimes better to recapitulate it in written form. As you now, i’m currently working on releasing the demo and i’m happy to report that i’ve made some great strides recently.

First and foremost i updated the navigation system for npcs and animals. There always was a annoying delay of almost a second when the player puts or removes objects on the map. This was caused, because the navmesh was created from the tilemap and therefore consisted of several hundreds polygons. This is now optimized and placing and removing objects is now very smooth.

Of course, updating the navigation system also had an impact on other parts of the game. So i spent some time updating the behavior tree action for the NPCs and animals on the island. This took a little longer than expected, but it was worth it because i was able to optimize other parts of the NPCs behavior at the same time. I can now easily create a daily schedule for each NPC by combining different behaviors/actions/jobs. This daily schedule can even be changed by other parts of the game, i.e. the quest system. So the daily behavior of some NPCs is now different when a certain quest chain is running and changes again after the quest chain is over or solved.

Finally, i spent some time restructuring parts of the user interface. The goal was on the one hand to make it easier to use for the player and also to improve accessibility. Most of the panels are now organized under a “user Panel” tab container, which makes it easier to access and switch between inventory, quest log, map, skilltree and settings. This part is still ongoing, since some elements, especially the user stats, are not completly implemented yet. So the inventory/ equipment panel will be updated after i have done the player stats alongside with the fighting system.

Going forward, i plan to focus on optimizing the crafting systems already in use over the next days. The look and feel should be the same throughout the game. As mentioned above, i will also implement a small fighting system and update the players stats with properties needed.