As a demi god, cleanse the rot infesting an ancient civilization deep in the jungle.
Genre: Action RPG
Team Size: 18 (6 programmers)
Reference Game: Diablo III
Engine: TRK (Our Custom C++ Engine)
Project Information: Spite: Parasite was my fifth game I worked on at The Game Assembly and the first created in our custom C++ engine, Tre Rader Kod.
Contributions
○ Pathfinding: I handled importing nav meshes from Unreal Engine, processing them to find separate vertices laying on top of each other and creating a component to easily interface with and travers it using A*.
○ VFX systems and editor: I expanded a previously made particle editor to be able to edit combined mesh and particle effects. I also added a VFX helper to create and later destroy effects so that they could be played in a fire and forget manner
○ Optimizations: Frustum culling of meshes and light sources
○ Debug tools: Debug lines and developer debug buttons and sliders via a debug hud
More about pathfinding
When creating the pathfinding the goal was to make an all purpose easy to use component but this faced some complications due to our design decisions. Our engine was based on Nvidia's PhysX and as such all characters used colliders to stand on. When adding a navmesh it was therefore decided to not limit the height to the nav mesh but instead the physics environment. The issue caused by this decision was that the initial pathfinding used a simple distance calculation, in effect a sphere, to determine if the pathfinder had arrived and was ready for the next waypoint of the path but seeing as the character could be standing higher up or be pushed to the sides this would often lead to jittering.
To solve this instead of checking distance as a sphere, waypoints were treated as planes with their normal aligned to the direction of travel. In this way neither the height of the object nor how far to the sides it was mattered, it would still pass the plane and then continue towards the next waypoint.
