Pathfinding + Animations Adapted to Different Characters (Patreon)

Hi there!

Alex here today to share some development updates regarding the live mode of the game. This post is for Patrons only so please don't share it, thank you!

Pathfinding

As you can see on our recently shared development roadmap, Jérémie has been doing research and tests for our pathfinding system lately. What is pathfinding, you might ask?

The first aspect of pathfinding is to generate a navigation map of where characters can walk, everywhere in the game world.

The zones in blue indicate where characters can go to and navigate.

The second aspect of pathfinding is to make the character move on that navigation map. An algorithm needs to calculate the fastest or more natural path on the map. Then, the character needs to be moved along that path. The movement needs to look smooth and natural.

Jérémie recently integrated a first prototype of pathfinding in Paralives so our characters can now find their way in houses and on the terrain which is pretty exciting for us!

A first version of our pathfinding. It will be largely reworked to improve and optimize the algorithm as well as to make the movement and animations smoother. Note: If the above GIF doesn’t play for you, try opening this Patreon post on a computer rather than a mobile device.

Pathfinding is a difficult system to develop for multiple reasons:

• The algorithm to generate the navigation map is complicated and it also needs to be very optimized because the navigation map will need to be quickly recreated when players place a wall or piece of furniture.
• The algorithm to find the best path is also very complicated and needs to be optimized because characters are very often walking to different places in their house and in the world.
• When trying to find the best path, there are many things to consider. For example, the fastest path to get to the park might be by walking through a stranger’s lot but we want to avoid that.
• Sometimes, a character needs to interact and animate with an object on their path like possibly stairs, ladders, doors. It’s even possible that a character needs to swim through a swimming pool in order to get to the desired location!
• Other characters might be blocking the way so a moving character sometimes needs to pause and wait for another character to free the way.
• Adding wheelchairs has been requested a lot and is something that we are looking into. We would need to have alternatives to stairs and also wheelchair accessible furniture to make it work without limiting the game experience too much for Parafolks using wheelchairs.
• Eventually, we will have cars and bikes so characters will need to consider if they want to use these to get to a location. Cars and bikes will have their own pathfinding quirks. For instance, cars can only move on roads and a character on a bike cannot climb a ladder!

We will be working on all these challenges and it will be really satisfying to see our Parafolks walking around everywhere after that!

Animations Adapted to Different Characters

A while back, Anna was working on dynamically adapting character animations so that they work regardless of the height of the characters. It was put on hold while we were working on other aspects of the game but we have now resumed. Good progress has been made lately and also modders will now be able to use these procedural tools to adapt their own animations.

Let me tell you about an example for a dynamic and procedural animation. As you might know, the height slider is an important feature in Paralives but it adds many challenges for animations in live mode. For instance, when sitting on a chair, if you are tall and have long legs, you might need to bend the knees a bit more when sitting. If you are short, your feet might not even touch the ground while sitting. Since a character can be of any height, we cannot simply do multiple animations. We need to adapt the base sitting animation dynamically to make it look natural regardless of the character’s height.

The top image shows the sitting animation without the procedural adaptation while the bottom image has them. The sitting animation will still be improved. For example, right now, the hands are floating above the thighs but they need to rest on them. This will also be fixed by using our procedural animation system.

The procedural animation tools will be useful for all kinds of animations. When grabbing a cup on a table, a short character’s arm will have to be raised higher than the arm of a tall character. When two characters kiss, the short one will need to look up while the taller one will look down. Same thing goes when hugging, dancing or just talking. In short, the tools we are building will be extremely useful and will make the animations a lot more realistic and smooth!

Have a great weekend and take care!

Alex