Delivering with dispatchers

  • Post published:February 3, 2022
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One of the main aspects of the game is expanding and building structures outside cells.

This can be done through dispatcher which can deliver materials directly to growing zones or to extracellular structures.

In this example we’re building some collagen helices with ribosomes, which are then assembled into collagen flooring and delivered outside (that’s that floating bubble!).

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Debugging Railing Movement

  • Post published:December 10, 2021
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It’s hard to find some bugs when there are fast items which are moving in a tile map, possibly locking some states to prevent other items from moving into same tiles or allowing routing when multiple choices can be made.

To our rescue, it’s possible to slow down time to track down what’s exactly happening under the hood. This, together with some visual hints, helps the whole process.

The cyan tile represents the busy state while the string over the item tells the direction which the item is moving toward and its internal state relative to the current tile.

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Producing and assembling proteins

  • Post published:December 3, 2021
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Living cells are all about producing proteins for all kind of purposes, joining amino acids which are the building block of all the proteins.

Even the structure which gives the shape to the cell (and has a lot of other functions), the cytoskeleton, is made by proteins.

Proteins are usually synthesized in ribosomes and then they assemble in complex structures.

This is what it’s happening right here in the animation! This small network is producing microtubules, which are used to route items on the ground of the cell, in two steps:

  • first simple amino acids (round spheres) are crafted into tubulin in ribosomes
  • then a red tubulin and a green tubulin are assembled into a finished microtubule

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Pathfinding, this unknown

  • Post published:November 29, 2021
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I must say that pathfinding has always fascinated me, because it’s a class of algorithms which produce visible and elegant output.

Broadly speaking, it’s a sort of procedural way of generating graphics.

I’m investigating different approaches to computing all the necessary graphs, trying to optimize paths when possible according to the geometry but this is not easy.

Underneath a classic A* algorithm is used, but procedurally placing the nodes ot the graph is proving itself harder than I though!

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Using kickers to force specific directions

  • Post published:November 24, 2021
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Since there’s no way to let a microtubule decide the direction of an item, it will continue on it’s direction unless a kicker changes it! There is only a specific circumstance in which it’s possible to determine which direction should an item go and that’s when it’s dropped on a microtubule end, in that scenario there’s only one direction to choose from.

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Procedural Resource Generation

  • Post published:November 23, 2021
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It’s rather hard to find a proper way to generate resources inside an infinite map and being able to use a seed to generate them in the same way. You need two seeds: one is used as the general seed, while another seed is used for each kind of procedural data you want to generate so that you can combine the two and obtain a different start point in the PNRG sequence.

This is rather useful when you want to scatter around a start point resources randomly but at the same time lazily. Using seeds allows to avoid precomputing all the data, you will be always able to figure out if at coordinate (x,y) there is a specific resource or not with a constant (more or less) time complexity.

You add some bias and mapping function to the results and you are also able to decide how far from the center and how often compared to distance it should spawn.

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