Family Time Development Part 10 - More Pup Behaviors and Water Physics!

Video shows the summary, text shows the technical!

This week:

• More Pup Behaviors

• Water Physics

More Pup Behaviors

Headpats, ear massages, and chin rubs have been implemented! There are still lots of animations I'd like to do including fun rare headpat animations. But more on that later.

The wolf pups also shake their little bodies whenever they come out of the water. I ran out of time this week to add actual water particles shaking off from their bodies so I'll do that later.

Water Physics

Every great game needs great water. Family Time is no exception. The water physics are simply epic. They realistically flow down hills, accumulate into puddles, ponds, lakes, and even rivers! All at 500 frames per second. This means that beaches and oceans are totally possible as well.

Water also pushes creatures, the player, wild animals, and the Wolf Mama around depending on the water flow speed. Navigation also works very well with it so animals can intelligently follow others around (This part was hard and it took a few days of figuring out!). Water physics stretches out to the full map size of 4096x4096 and has a depth height resolution of 16 bits.

The way the water works is simple: simulate a heightfield that is flowing on top of the terrain heightfield. The shader that accompanies however, is not so simple. I've accumulated sizeable experience working as a professional rendering and shader engineer in the past and I figured out cheap ways to represent flow and interpolate it smoothly in a very performant manner. It was also a very fun problem to solve because water is notoriously difficult in games.

But it works realistically: buoyancy and water forces are present. Agents splash when entering at high speeds (I reused MyRobot splash animations since they fit the art style). Water will also leave behind mud and fertile soil for farming. You can already see this in action in the short sped-up clip I posted in the video! Watch it again!

The only caveat is that you won't be able to build water dams out of buildings. That part proved too expensive to simulate, so instead you'll have to build dams out of digging and dumping terrain!

Next week is Episode 2 Game Release and will include everything you have seen so far!

Stay tuned!