I’ve been working on exclusion zones in the world editor and this is what I have so far:
Right, what is this? This is Penrith Forest a little away from the farmhouse in among some big trees. Near the middle of the screen you can see a tiny little boar. It only looks small because the camera is pretty high up. That boar is the center of the yellow cylinder and that represents a wandering zone for the enemy at the center, in this case a boar. Eventually I’ll need to configure how many enemies to keep in the zone, but not now. The blue cylinders are intended to be “exclusion zones” where the boars will not walk. This is computationally less expensive than having the boars move around with standard collision detection turned on. You can imagine that it’s really easy to determine whether a point or path is within one large circle and not within a few smaller circles. Since I need to control movement only in a very general way it make sense to do it the cheap way. Of course, this is more work on the front end. I have to actually define each of these zones but as long as the tools in the world editor work ok it’s not too bad.
Next I’ll need to update the server code so that boars won’t walk into or through an exclusion zone. That should be fairly simple, I hope.