YAAAAAAAAY! 8D (I think)

[Quasarrgames]

Just read the changelog today. Saw this:

April 23
Started designing and implementing region graph to be used for reachability determination, hierarchical pathfinding, room finding, danger detection and spatial markup, closest-object search, and potentially other purposes. This is a major project.

and this:

April 24
Got region graph working in first version with regions linked by portals and edge spans. Needs optimization and integration into various specific problem solutions.



Correct me if i'm wrong, bu this looks an awful lot like an idea i suggested in the past:

SECTORS!


Basically, i think there are going to be other playing fields like the one we all play in now, but they will be connected at the edges and people can travel between them!

YAY!

(not sure if this is really what it means though)

[Tynan]

No, sorry.

Technically, what I'm doing is just going to lead to:

-Massive performance improvements, especially with large maps and lots of characters.
-More correct behavior regarding different types of characters navigating properly around barriers that only some of them can pass (like doors).

The good news is that performance improvements are good for map size. It'll be more feasible for more people to play at 300x300 or even larger sizes.

Of course, there's always another bottleneck not far away (I think the next one is CPU-side render performance) but this will certainly help in any case.

[keylocke]

"danger detection" : this was the part i was most intrigued about.

does this mean colonists would no longer search for jobs that would put them between enemy crossfire or passing through flames or going outside during animals attacks or enemy raids?

what is the scope of this danger detection?

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"More correct behavior regarding different types of characters navigating properly around barriers that only some of them can pass (like doors)"

does this mean that alpha 4 will have restriction access for each colonists?

i like it, even though i'm not sure why this was part of the higher priorities..
('coz i'm still trying to figure out what kind of rooms would actually benefit from restriction access)

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"closest-object search" : hopefully this works way better than the current one. 

travel-time for resource collection on a labyrinthine base is too much hassle.hehe.

[Geeves]

Seeing as the maximum map size got a huge boost in the last patch, these new optimizations will help my colonies a lot in the (near) future.

[Tynan]

"danger detection" : this was the part i was most intrigued about.

does this mean colonists would no longer search for jobs that would put them between enemy crossfire or passing through flames or going outside during animals attacks or enemy raids?

That's the goal. Nothing has been done though. However, having a high-quality map of interlinked regions of the map will make danger detection a lot more viable. Doing it by mapping danger to every square might have been a bit heavy.

"More correct behavior regarding different types of characters navigating properly around barriers that only some of them can pass (like doors)"

does this mean that alpha 4 will have restriction access for each colonists?

i like it, even though i'm not sure why this was part of the higher priorities..
('coz i'm still trying to figure out what kind of rooms would actually benefit from restriction access)

No. More like: animals now know they can't pass your doors at the reachability-check level instead of trying and failing an A* path search to get through. This is because the old system only handled one "reachability map" for all characters, which was set to allow passing doors. The new system has a graph of regions with links and they traverse the graph looking for routes.

"closest-object search" : hopefully this works way better than the current one. 

travel-time for resource collection on a labyrinthine base is too much hassle.hehe.

Indeed you are correct. But that's the idea.