Thea 2: The Shattering – On Tricky Issues and Limited Resources

The latest developer blog post for MuHa Games’ upcoming 4X/RPG hybrid Thea 2: The Shattering describes a few issues the team’s been having lately with resource spawning and explains why these seemingly minor issues that result in unintentionally hovering foxes and goats are a bit harder to fix than one might imagine. Check it out:

We’re painfully aware that we’re not keeping the website up to date, but we’re not dead, just too busy to remember about updates This month, we’re going to share some of our internal team mechanics and struggles with all of you who care.

So, the problem we’ve been having recently was floating foxes and seaworthy bones – it turns out we have visual issues with our resources when they spawn on a shoreline.

As you will see below, we have some water-loving foxes next to some aqua vegetables, goats having a swim and some bones floating happily in the sea.

Now, this isn’t exactly a game breaking issue, and some may say there’s nothing wrong with goats having a swim, on the other hand, we’re kind of annoyed that we can’t find an entirely satisfying solution for now. Why can’t we?

The problem is a combination of technical/design issues and limitations in human resources. We could just not spawn resources on the shoreline altogether, but this would result in potentially barren areas, especially on small islands. We could not show a resource when it touched water, but this could result in the resource being invisible graphically yet available to gather, something we definitely do not want. We cannot adjust resource positioning manually because our maps are randomly generated and so shoreline can take different shapes and sizes. And in the end, we want the resources to actually be something more than a single tiny model in the very middle of a hex (where it turns out to cause the least issues).

So for now at least, we have resigned ourselves to accepting that parts of a resource may still show on water, and so floating foxes around Thea rejoiced!

Another visual glitch we’ll have to learn to live with are partially floating animals. If a bundle of goats appears on a hill (or any other kind of slope), sometimes one of the models lands on a steep terrain and either front or back of the animal finds itself hanging mid-air. This happens because only the centre of the model is at the ground level. The same problem exists with buildings of course, but in their case, we can easily account for the slope by adding a bit of structure below the ground level. For animals, however, we cannot simply make their legs longer. We would need to calculate the average angle value of a portion of the slope where the animal stands and adjust the model’s rotation. So it technically is doable, but rather time-consuming and this is why we’ll have to leave it as it is. Some could say this is a lazy approach, but our single programmer (who’s got much more important stuff on his shoulders) is a good enough excuse. And to be fair, a similar problem existed in Thea: The Awakening and no one really noticed.