So, I noticed that during the tech talk about flowfields, it was mentioned that different classes of units would have entirely different flowfields - air, land, sea, orbital. It was also mentioned that KBots would have different flowfields from tanks, and that subs might have different flowfields from normal boats. Wouldn't it be more efficient to just have those units interpret the flowfield differently? Like, let's say you have some mountainous terrain, and 5 units; a Heavy Tank, a Hover Transport, a VTOL Gunship, a KBot and a SpiderBot. The way I see it happening is that each of those units has a different 'ceiling' and 'floor' cost height. The ceiling is the maximum cost that the unit is capable of going through, the floor is the minimum cost that affects the unit's move speed. The Heavy tank would have, say, a floor of 0.1, and a ceiling of 1.2. If the cost is 0.1 or less, the unit treats it as flat land, but if it is 1.2 or more, it is regarded as an impasse. The KBot on the other hand has a floor of 0.6, and a ceiling of 2.5, allowing it to traverse bumpier terrain with less concern. The SpiderBot would have a floor of 1, and an unlimited ceiling, because spiderbots are cool like that. The gunship would be slightly different in that it would have a pretty high floor (4 or something) depending on its operational altitude, and effectively no ceiling, because it can change its altitude. So, my question is, do flowfields work like this? Or is it more efficient to just have different flowfields for each significantly different move type? Notice I didn't mention the Hover unit back there, this leads to my seconds question. Would there be multiple 'types' of cost? So, the Hover Transport would have a pretty standard ceiling and floor, maybe 0.3 and 1.6 respectively, but if it uses the standard land cost fields then it will completely avoid water. So I have to ask, would it be more efficient to have a completely different cost field for hover units, or just add a 'tag' to the bits of cost data for water, that says 'water'. This way, regular Land units can still interpret water as an impassable obstacle cost-wise, so they don't... Drown? Can robots drown? While Hover units will interpret the 'water' cost as entirely passable. Same would go for Naval units, who would interpret land as impassable, and water as smooth sailing. This is all based on a mod-developer's understanding of what I saw in the video, and I might be entirely wrong in these respects. It just sounds inefficient to have seperately generated and stored cost fields for each movetype. But I am intrigued more than anything, it really was interesting to hear about how this all works.
I believe someone asked whether there would be a different one for bots and tanks and the answer was no. there was one for each movement class, so ground, hover, sea, seabed, air, etc. The different costs for each one were represented as like an alpha channel for the terrain texture except its pass-ability instead of transparency. each flow field is like its own extra channel, which is why its best to keep that number as low as possible.
