DINODRIFTERS Dev Diary #5: Dinosaur and Animal Species

Hello and welcome to another DINODRIFTERS dev diary!

There are thousands upon thousands of known prehistoric species all over the world. In DINODRIFTERS, I estimate that just under a thousand of these will feature.

Behold! The Dinosaur Mode character creation screen. You can customise species, age, sex and colour. The dinosaurs available differ between times and places.

Now, given that these species range from the famous and massive Tyrannosaurus to the tiny, rat sized Dorsetisaurus, its only natural that they are treated differently. In Dinosaur Mode, all dinosaur species (even those like the tiny Halszkaraptor) will be playable. All pterosaurs will be playable too, except some of the tiniest (the kinds that lived on the sides of sauropods). 

Pre-Jurassic, larger and dominant non-dinosaurs will be playable (like Gorgonops, Arthropleura and Anomalocaris). Post-Cretaceous, large birds and mammals like take over (like Smilodon and Phorusrhacos). That's not to say that smaller animals won't be in the game, but there is priority to those that are larger, interesting and well-known.

These large animals have full AI and are tracked across the map by the game's systems. They only despawn upon death, as is natural. 

Animals that are not playable in Dinosaur Mode are classed by the game as 'volatile'. As cool as it would be to play as a spider or a rodent, it would be suicide due to how low its stats are. So, the game has a chance to spawn small lizards, mammals, fish and insects depending on area type, weather and a host of other variables. They are despawned upon the end of said turn. This saves a great deal of memory as the game is not having to track a thousand tiny animals across the whole map. They are food for small predators, nothing more.

At the time of writing this, the upper limit of non-volatile animals capable of being tracked while keeping performance above an average of 60 FPS is around 200, at max capacity of other objects. However, this is unoptimised and I aim to achieve a maximum of 500 for the largest maps I have planned.


Next diary, I will talk about the user interface and control  mechanisms in DINODRIFTERS!

Until next time!