Micro Voxel Dinosaurs

Another thing I’ve pushed forward quite a bit is the dinosaurs themselves.

I actually wasn’t planning to start working on this just yet, but the prototype dinosaurs I had in the game were starting to stand out for the wrong reasons. They were basically made from fairly large blocks, so a whole dinosaur might only be made up of 20 or so visible blocks.

I always had it in my head that micro voxels would be the way to go eventually. The engine already supports them, and things like weapons and items are already built using micro voxels, so I decided to start moving the dinosaurs over as well.

At the moment I only have 11 dinosaurs in the game, but they’ve now all been rebuilt using micro voxels, and the difference is pretty huge. They still fit the voxel style of the game, but there’s a lot more shape and detail to them now.

Because of that extra detail, I’ve also had to start thinking more seriously about LODs. A Brachiosaurus, for example, is around 50,000 triangles at full detail, so over distance the models reduce in complexity to keep things sensible performance wise.

I’ve also been doing quite a bit of work on how the dinosaurs actually move.

One of the things I really didn’t like before was how they changed direction. If a dinosaur decided to attack something or turn around, the movement could feel really snappy. I had some smoothing in place, but it still looked wrong.

The new pathing works much more around proper curves and turning arcs. So a T-Rex, for example, can’t just turn on the spot. It has a much larger turning radius and has to properly move around to face something.

It sounds like quite a small thing, but it makes the dinosaurs feel a lot more physical and a lot less like AI agents just moving between points.

There’s still a lot of work to do on the AI side, and I’m definitely not where I want to be with it yet, but it’s starting to come together.

The other big thing I wanted to fix was foot sliding. Previously, the relationship between movement speed and animation just wasn’t quite right, so dinosaurs could look like they were skating across the terrain.

That’s now been fixed as well, and they feel much more planted to the ground.

Between the extra detail, the better turning behaviour and fixing the movement, the dinosaurs are finally starting to feel much closer to what I had in my head when I first started building them.