Large ant armies merge together

Diavid

Worker
Backer
Beta Tester
In the newest Backers Demo (0.0561) big armies merge into a kind of ball when they meet. A enemy ball can also get dangerous for the player because if the players ants run separately to the ball they die before they can do anything.
And it also doesn't look very well of course.



Do you have a idea how to avoid it?
The ants did not do that in the Demo before (0.041).
But there they did stuck sometimes. But not very often and i think it was only at the edge of some tiles.
 

MikeSlugDisco

Community Manager
Staff member
Community Manager
This is a consequence of a change to the way collision detection is handled (it was a quick fix done to work round another issue). It'll be fixed in an upcoming update to the demo.
 

JohnSlugDisco

Administrator
Staff member
Developer of EotU
I can talk a little more about this. It appeared because of something we were testing as a fix for "traffic jams" and the ants could move through one another for a short time if they became stuck. This had the unfortunate side effect that when an army is attacking, the ones at the back would pass through the front ones and create this tightly packed army.

We have since changed the system. Now ants cannot do this if an enemy is nearby, and if they do they are no longer on a timer, they instead stop passing through once they are no longer on top of another ant. Additionally the ants repel one another if they are on top.

We will continue to monitor and improve this, but the next release you will notice this is no longer an issue.
 

Brosencrantz

Larva
Backer
Beta Tester
Interesting! Presumably that will also affect how we build our colonies and armies, as massing the maximum possible number of soldiers in one place isn't as useful...
 
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