| Dev Diary #5 - Requirements to Open & Pathfinding [message #190] |
Fri, 17 November 2023 21:51 |
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Horemheb
Messages: 86
Registered: October 2022
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Hello everyone. This is our fifth development diary for School Builder. Today I'll be talking about what you'll need to do before opening your school.
If you try to open the school and advance to the fall term before things are ready you will see this screen. To open the school you will need, at the bare minimum:
1. You have set your school's basic policies, as we went over in Dev Diary #3
2. Have at least eight classrooms for your inaugural (Grade 1) class
-As mentioned previously there will three grade levels attending your school. In your first year of operation you will only have your inaugural class (Grade 1) at the school. The next year you will have both Grade 1 and Grade 2 and in your third year your school will be fully up and running with all three grade levels attending. While we have not fixed the exact number just yet (that will need simulation and player testing) - each classroom will probably hold around 20-40 students maximum. Of course if your school is wealthy you can have lower teacher to student ratios if you wish provided there are enough classrooms.
3. At least one bathroom per eight classrooms
-You'll need a minimum of one bathroom per eight classrooms; if you have nine you'll need two, 17 three and so on. Each bathroom will have a male and female side. Convenient access to bathrooms is important and students and staff may grumble if there are not enough, or are placed too far away.
4. A clinic
-Students (and sometimes staff) who are sick or injured will go to the clinic to get well. Of course some naughty ones might just be faking that pink eye...
5. A canteen
-A very large structure, the canteen is where meals prepared and served to students and staff. Some of the miscellaneous policy decisions you'll need to make will relate to campus dining. For instance must students eat in the canteen or can they take meals to go? Can students who live close to campus go home for lunch? Etc.
6. Have hired a Headmaster, D.M. and D.D.M.
7. Three individual offices for the Headmaster, D.M. and D.D.M.
-The Headmaster, D.M. and D.D.M. each must have a private office
8. At least one teacher's room / joint office
Now as the game tells you these are the bare minimums to open and merely meeting the minimum requirements is no guarantee of success in the long run.
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Pathfinding
Now most of this past week we've been working on AI pathfinding:
Each character in the game will have their own schedule and places they need to go. In the screenshot above you can see the circle with "AF" in it. This is a test character (w/ placeholder graphic). Right now this character is up behind the school shop but needs to go the classroom on the bottom left. How he gets from point A to point B, without walking through solid buildings or taking a convoluted route, is what pathfinding is all about.
Devising and implementing an AI pathfinding system is a first for us; DME1 had a very primitive (and often buggy) function that allowed NPCs to receive a command to walk to a certain point on a map, but without any kind of collision detection or pathfinding. All in all it's been very challenging, but as of Friday evening we've got it mostly functional. (Fingers crossed when it's scaled up to hundreds or even thousands of characters moving around at once!)
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That's all for this time! For the next week and probably a bit beyond we'll be working on the character scheduling system.
[Updated on: Sat, 18 November 2023 12:12] Report message to a moderator |
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