4 ms·

If the game is 2D and you can divide space into tiles/blocks and walls/obstacles have their own blocks/tiles (or you can easily establish a grid over your world

If the game is 2D and you can divide space into tiles/blocks and walls/obstacles have their own blocks/tiles (or you can easily establish a grid over your world and determine what cell each actor is in), I wonder if there's way to use BFS in a maze-solving manner to calculate shortest path between a given actor and the target you want to check visibility for, and if the distance in blocks/tiles returned by BFS/pseudo-pathfinding is greater than a direct distance formula calculation between the two blocks/cells then maybe you know there's an obstacle? I guess that requires you to be able to create the network/graph of traversable nodes as well.

QuadmasterXLII 3y ago
(Roughly, glossing over ‘linear in what?’) Good bfs gets close to linear, good raycasting should be way, way sublinear
- LarsDu88 3y ago
  "Good raycasting should be sublinear" yes, but some folks like to stick 100 raycasts on every character which will kill the performance regardless of what engine your making your game in.
  - eutectic 3y ago
    We now have games which rely on shooting millions of rays per frame for rendering.
hutzlibu 3y ago
Well, the world is destructible, so when there is a small hole (of dynamic size) in a wall, then a enemy bot should really only see the player, if there is no rubble blocking the path. Meaning tiles are waay too big for my simulation and raycasting the most straightforward way, also some enemies can evade projectiles and obstacles, but also have to scan them first. And it works already the way I want it. It could just be more performant, so more details and realism would be possible.
- rcme 3y ago
  And, additionally, raycasting should just work in a good game engine. “You don’t need raycasting” is a seriously weak argument.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    Yes. I just expect raycasting to work allmost as good as possible, not on 50% to become a unnecessary blocker. But they say, they are going to fix it with some priority.

QuadmasterXLII 3y ago

(Roughly, glossing over ‘linear in what?’) Good bfs gets close to linear, good raycasting should be way, way sublinear

LarsDu88 3y ago
"Good raycasting should be sublinear" yes, but some folks like to stick 100 raycasts on every character which will kill the performance regardless of what engine your making your game in.
- eutectic 3y ago
  We now have games which rely on shooting millions of rays per frame for rendering.

hutzlibu 3y ago

Well, the world is destructible, so when there is a small hole (of dynamic size) in a wall, then a enemy bot should really only see the player, if there is no rubble blocking the path. Meaning tiles are waay too big for my simulation and raycasting the most straightforward way, also some enemies can evade projectiles and obstacles, but also have to scan them first. And it works already the way I want it. It could just be more performant, so more details and realism would be possible.

rcme 3y ago
And, additionally, raycasting should just work in a good game engine. “You don’t need raycasting” is a seriously weak argument.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  Yes. I just expect raycasting to work allmost as good as possible, not on 50% to become a unnecessary blocker. But they say, they are going to fix it with some priority.