Devlog - 16: Influence & visualization

Devlog - 16: Influence & visualization

It's been a while since the last devlog. I've been a bit swamped with freelance work (gotta survive somehow) + figuring out all the various issues & edge cases related to the latest influence improvements I've been making.

So, let's get started.

In the last devlog I've shown how influence clashed with one another and the space in between where there's no winner in influence. That worked, yes, but it wasn't efficient at all. So I've revamped the way I do this and increase influence in tiles in general.

Besides improving the overall performance, I had to improve my visualizations as logging various operations on a large number of tiles is too much data all at once. It's hard to figure out the issues from so many logs without a clear connection between them. So I decided to visualize influence so I can actually see the discrepancy between data and actual tile visuals. I already had a visualization system before but it could only handle player related stuff while now I also wanted to throw in the enemy influence grid so I can follow how they clash.

It took me a bit to improve it, but here's the end result of the visualization:

With that out of the way I had enough info to find out issues and solve them. I took a while as the system was a bit spaghetti but now I feel confident to add more interactions with it in the future.

I was also able to get in a clash detection system that detects clashing tiles and spawns various effects on the area in between. It's still in the early stages as I'd like it to be a bit more dynamic and fluid + maybe making the border shorter or have special tiles. But more about that when I get to improving that part :)

Final preview with everything so far related to influence & clash:

See you guys next time :)