desire paths

a feature

as you move through the world, the world recognizes your movement, slowly but surely.

players past creates slowly fading paths, that shows where others have been before. if many take similar paths, the path coalesces, into a easier to see one. the more the world is lived on the cleared the paths are, the easier it is to get to places.

some characters are more path oriented then others. some create paths strongly, some are invisible to path creation, some can only really move on paths

julian said he found this youtube video where to make snow footsteps effects one would emit invisble particles from the character, then have a camera looking from above to which only the particles rendered, and then the render texture of that camera would be used to generate the input for the footstep shader. pretty cool idea.

our implementaiton uses that as a core principle, each character has their desire path emission, with a square orthographic camera rendering on top of the current terrain. such texture then gets written every once in a while to the main terrains desire path texture and synchronized with the server, where it gets everyone elses texture and adds them together. it has to be a slow effect, it can be stored locally in the server, and merged with every other server, to make it exist between multi iterations of the game, each person brings their own worlds desire paths.

hopefully this also creates devs desire paths, our own paths through the world as we develop it.