Out of the doorway

Watching Cold Landing at dusk, I noticed the people walking home did not walk straight. They turned left, then right, then left again, a little each step, as if they could not make up their minds. It happened in a crowd, but also to someone walking alone across an empty field, and that looked plain broken.

The cause was the way people kept out of each other’s way. I had written that myself, piece by piece, every time someone got stuck: step aside here, give way there, try again. Each piece fixed one jam and the sum of them made everyone twitch. So it went out, all of it, and in came a method that has been in games and robots for years, called ORCA. Every person looks at the ten people nearest to them, works out which speeds would bump into nobody for the next two seconds, and picks the one closest to where they wanted to go. On top of that, two people meeting head on both lean a little to their right, so they pass like people do on a pavement instead of stopping nose to nose.

On a busy evening in Cold Landing the turning back and forth is now about half of what it was. Not gone, so I will keep watching it. The longest anyone stood stuck in a crowd went down to less than a ninth of before.

That method comes from a library someone else wrote and shared, and it asks that its licence travels with the game. So does Godot, the engine, and so do .NET and the fonts. I want to sell this game one day, so it now has a credits page on the start menu with each of them and its full licence. Before all of that comes a card of its own, which matters more to me than the legal part: a thank you to the fifteen people on freesound whose sixteen recordings became the sounds of the town. They gave them away for free, and their names belong in the game.

Then, at the office in Cold Landing, two clerks stood in front of the door and a third, on the way somewhere, stood still next to them, unable to get past. The office has no floor inside to work on, unlike the sawmill, so the game had left its clerks outside, right in the doorway. Now anyone at work goes in. Where there is a floor they work on it, as before; where there is none, like the office, the school and the mine, they are simply out of sight until they come out again. People whose work is outside, like the loggers going to their trees, stay outside.

The market stalls got a little more care. The seller is inside the stall now, so nobody walks into them, but you can still see them, walking between the counter and the back, and stepping up to the counter when someone comes to buy. I have not watched that in the game yet, so that is tomorrow’s first look.

The quarry and the clay pit have their workers out of sight for now too, which is not how it should be: you dig in a pit, you do not go into one. They need a pickaxe, a shovel and a way to swing them first. That is on the list, with two more things this brought up: a quarry belongs on rock and a clay pit by the water, not just anywhere, and a fishing hut, which the river has been waiting for since it started to flow.