Jeff

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 40/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

Combining the IR camera with the AC-130 Gunship mode and it feels like that old Call of Duty mission.

So I added a kill counter too

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 73/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

1,000,000 zombies versus 2,000 police officers.
(Performance test)

Didn't record the whole thing but the police officers ended up losing

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 72/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

Added the last piece of RTS-style controls: Ordering troops around. Working with formations and large quantities turned out to be very different than the vehicle pathfinding

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 71/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

Sometimes I forget how large-scale this is. Just 100k zombies already looks massive, and on higher-end computers I can reach over a million smoothly.

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 70/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

Using a shader trick called interior mapping to give the illusion of depth on bullet impact.

True voxel destruction was too heavy on performance, especially when fighting with the rest of the sim for GPU time

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 69/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

Created a night theme of the updated graphics

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 68/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

Did a visual overhaul to replace the white placeholder graphics

There are still features (building destruction!) I want to implement, but I'm shifting focus towards polishing the visuals and UI

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 67/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

Added a giant laser sky beam because who doesn't love a good sky beam.

I'm sure some better sfx will make it feel better, plus I'm hoping to add building destruction in the future

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 66/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

Ported over the pathfinding experiments for planes into the full simulation.

A lot of work when I could've just had the planes fly straight at a high altitude, but it's nice to see them weave between structures.

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 65/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

Inspired by the black hole feature, I reused some of the same functionality to create a tornado

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 64/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

Added an APC to the vehicle system

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 63/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

Added Humvees with mounted MGs to the vehicle system

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

How it works:

1. A single anchor representing the squad does Astar

2. A flow field around the main Astar path is computed

3. The squad follows a formation around the anchor as it moves

4. If a member is stuck, they fallback to the flow field until they return to the anchor

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 62/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

Exploring a mix of flow field and Astar pathfinding to handle formation movement with many units in narrow streets. Had Claude put together a video of one of the approach

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 61/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

Added 'evac' helicopters that will land, pick up civilians, then fly off the map

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 60/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

Exploring pathfinding systems for planes doing strafing runs in a city

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 59/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

Added proper UI so I can control tanks in an RTS style.

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 58/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

First port of vehicle pathing into the simulation. It goes wherever the purple flare is.

The path itself is computed once on CPU when the flare is placed, then the path is uploaded to the GPU for execution

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 57/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

Testing vehicle pathfinding (roads are low cost so they prefer to drive on them).

I usually prototype logic and tuning externally before porting it over to the main simulation since debugging GPU code is a nightmare

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 56/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

Modified the pull of the black hole so that it forms an accretion disk.

Still not sure how this helps the zombie sim though...

[Jeff @jeffrey_turnock]

Day 55/100 of building a city-sized zombie simulation

I don't think this is what they mean in SF when they talk about achieving Singularity