j9liu / animalsim Goto Github PK

I'd love to replace the models with higher fidelity ones -- or at least, ones that have animations. This could either be purchased from an external website or custom modeled.

Adding our own models / animations would be cool, and we could keep stylistic similarity between them. But we'd have to find the time to actually learn how to do them 😅

The environment of the sim is clearly rather barebones. Acorns are meant to spawn from trees that are placed (ideally procedurally) around the level. But this isn't a purely aesthetic task.

Part of the reason I didn't get around to this was, I didn't figure out the best way to make animals pathfind. In the past, I've done grid-based movement where impassable geometry was rasterized to a grid. Then, animals could move to points just before intersecting the geometry. But maybe this isn't the right approach. It may be just as performant to raycast directly with physics colliders, instead of checking against this grid.

This involves the following subtasks:

• Adding a tree model (or multiple)
• Placing it artistically in the level
• Adding a handful of trees to the level
• Rework animal pathfinding to check for environmental collisions, and adjust accordingly
• Make acorns drop from the tree onto the ground at random intervals
• (bonus) Add proceduralism to placement of trees

The behavior tree visualizer is rather unsightly, and it would be worth investing time to polish the UI. I've also noticed a bug where the UI seems out of sync with the displayed behavior, so we should see if there's a more reliable way to communicate between the selected behavior tree and the UI nodes.

There is a non-working thirst meter for all animals -- let's get it to work :')

• Add a dedicated water source to the level.
• Rework animal pathfinding to account for this water source
• Make thirst decay over time
• Add drinking behavior to the behavior trees. This should involve the animal looking for + finding the water source, then pausing near the edge to drink. It can be interrupted when detecting nearby predators (if any).