[HN Gopher] Scaffold Level Editor
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       Scaffold Level Editor
        
       Author : mwkaufma
       Score  : 43 points
       Date   : 2025-04-07 20:00 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.littlepolygon.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.littlepolygon.com)
        
       | mwkaufma wrote:
       | A whistle-stop tour of some game-engine collision/pathfinding
       | background, how modern engines work, how old engines work, and
       | how I'm applying a mixed-approach in my game.
        
         | charlietran wrote:
         | Excellent article, and I appreciate how you gave an overview of
         | solutions that didn't make sense for you but were otherwise
         | important to know about.
         | 
         | Could you expand on how your pathfinding works for both ground-
         | based and flying enemies? I've been trying to wrap my head
         | around how to handle this on my own game, and trying not to
         | invent a wholly separate solution for enemies than can avoid
         | obstacles vertically.
        
           | mwkaufma wrote:
           | The scaffolding is built from convex volumes, and I know
           | which cuboid faces are "walls" and which are "windows" so I
           | link the windows into a graph where the shared-faces are
           | waypoints and do A*, using straight-line distance as the cost
           | function.
           | 
           | Big obstacles are just built from the scaffold itself, and
           | small obstacles are avoidable by just doing "whisker-traces"
           | to veer around them (the navigation path is a movement hint
           | used to calculate accelerations, not followed strictly).
        
       | Esras wrote:
       | Thanks for sharing! I was thinking how this is a good example of
       | the kinds of things that you _can_ do with a game engine that
       | already exists, as opposed to having to write everything
       | yourself.
       | 
       | Also a nice mention of octrees' use outside of voxels.
        
       | rdw wrote:
       | Thanks, Max! I've personally never been able to wrap my head
       | around BSP; I appreciate your diagrams explaining everything, and
       | I am optimistic about the new engine. It's crazy how much faster
       | it can be; really drives home how much extra stuff Unreal is
       | doing that your game may not need.
        
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