A Couple of Challenges

The past week has been a tough one. I really wanted to get something done for the Unity 2D Challenge which meant less time for Squillamorph. I also got ill again, that helped. In short, there isn't too much to talk about again. Nevertheless, there is something. :)

Pathfinding
I've reverted back to my heatmap method again, what a surprise! I'm doing things differently now though. Rather than pathing straight to the player. Enemies now path to one of a number of stationary points near to the player until they are close enough to use a much smaller dynamic heatmap that the player now generates. This means I can pre-generate heatmaps for each of those points. This is much better for performance but still needs work. Ideally, I would have a heatmap for every single tile. What a surprise though, generating an array of every tile for the total number of tiles crashes Unity. Yes I did try it. :D

What I am probably going to do is increase the number of pre-generated points and make the dynamic heatmap much smaller, or even find a completely different solution for close range pathfinding. While fixing these performance issues will take time, if I fix them now it will result in better features down the line.

Well I hope you don't mind the shorter update. I don't expect to have much to talk about in the next one as it is coming up to Christmas. Thanks for reading!

​If you are interested in the game I made for the Unity 2D Challenge you can check it out here: