MyRobot Development Part 72 - Starting Multiple Robots!
Added 2025-09-25 00:33:17 +0000 UTCVideo shows the summary, text shows the technical!
This week:
Preparing for Multiple Robots
Identifying Feature List
Preparing For Multiple Robots
So before I even start this month long incursion into multiple characters, I need to do some code refactoring and create tooling to easily test this new game feature.
At the moment I created a system for level of detail so that far away objects run cheaper logic depending on the distance from the camera. The biggest bottleneck identified thus far is the animation system. Each robot is relatively expensive to update so I made them update at at a larger interval if it's far away enough. This has all sorts of implications such as modifying the ragdoll animator physics to support animation intervals.
Another big challenge is going to be finding a way to reduce render batches when drawing the robots on the screen. Unfortunately the way the game is set up, each robot part is its own render object totally separate from a traditional skinned mesh renderer. So I may have to do something fancy if I want to fix this.
However the bottlenecks are mostly CPU bound so I'm not too worried about the rendering.
Identifying Feature List
Here are the preliminary goals for Multiple Robots:
Support 10 robots on screen at a stable framerate
Support social interactions between each other (talking, animating, etc.)
Support basic combat
Create the robot factory in the Forest.
Populate a couple desert settlements with some robot NPCs
That's IT. I have allocated 4~5 weeks to finish this milestone. Any comments or concerns? Comment below!
Stay tuned!
Comments
Sure thing
sgthale
2025-09-26 14:42:42 +0000 UTCJust a simple suggestion, maybe turn off 'face player' when I plug the USB into her head and it's still attached to the body. When she is constantly turning to face me, it makes targeting the USB attached to the back of head a real chore. Last thing, I run models locally and generation takes like 1 second longer than the game will wait. Any way we could adjust how long it waits (maybe in the options) for a response before a 'timeout' when using a local LLM? Thanks for the hard work man, great job.
Haywood Jablowme
2025-09-26 09:08:58 +0000 UTC
