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STELLAR JOCKEYS JANUARY NEWSLETTER

Welcome to the rst Stellar Jockeys newsletter for 2022. Let's chat brie yabout something else we're doing for Brigador Killers, and catch you up
on some of the recent housecleaning.
Benjamin, Stellar Jockeys

In uence Maps And You
In our November newsletter, we talked about changes to shadows inBrigador Killers. This month, we’re going to talk about In uence Maps. We
want to give you a broad overview of what they already do in Brigador,
and what we’re adding to them for BK. As before, we’ll drop some links forfurther reading.
When a level in Brigador loads, the engine creates something called anavigation mesh which covers the space in a level with a bunch of blue
parallelograms, which in our case serve as nodes. Normally these things
are not visible to players, but Brigador’s debug panel can be used tovisualize a lot of what goes on behind the scenes.

These nodes tell the player and the enemy what space is traversable andwhat is not: i.e. anything beyond the bounds of the “walls” of a level willnot have any navmesh nodes that can be walked on or driven across.
Speci cally for the AI, this navmesh assists it with path nding. Ifneighbouring nodes are connected, that means the AI can follow a path
between the two and traverse that distance without any problem. Whatsort of path the AI takes between two points is dependent on their current
AI state (e.g. “patrolling”, “standing guard”, “ eeing” etc.) as well as thepresence of environmental props like buildings.
[N.B. While we could go into much more detail about nodes, path nding
and AI states, in order to understand in uence maps, we need toacknowledge at least three other overarching concepts that all cometogether to create the behavior you see in game when encountering
NPCs.]
So what, then, are in uence maps? If the navmesh gives the AI a basic
understanding of where it can go, in uence maps give the AI context forthat same space. Every frame, the game keeps track of what is going on in
the nodes of a navmesh using in uence maps. In Brigador, there are ve:
Player, Enemy, Civilian threat, Safe and Tension.
If we turn on the visualizations for each in uence type, we can start to see
what each one does. Player is simple – it denotes the location node of theplayer-controlled vehicle. When the player is in a node and we turn on thedetails for that node, we can see both a number go up and that the cell
has changed color from blue to red.

[N.B. While it might be more accurate to refer to in uence maps as heatmaps because of this color visualization – this term is too often correlatedwith the topic of website and UX design and we don’t want to confuse
readers.]
Enemy, meanwhile, tells us which nodes are occupied by enemy NPCs.
Civilian threat is to tell non-combatant units like civilians where to avoid on
the map. Safe describes “safe” areas to retreat to: areas that are both far

from con ict and that have lots of healthy allies. Lastly, Tension is whenboth Player and Enemy in uence overlap, and the Tension value for a nodegoes up when both the player and enemy have similar in uence values: inother words, it’s contested ground.
The joy of having in uence maps is that, rather than looking at a bunch ofcomplicated mathematical equations, we as developers get to see a colorcoded representation of the AI’s perspective of the map, and depending
on a variety of actions (explosions, gun re, being spotted) thecorresponding in uence maps will inform the AI on what it can or cannot
do, such as whether to retreat or engage and what path to take. As an
example, in uence maps are basically the reason how Brigador manages
to avoid creating a stereotypical conga line of enemy units beelining
straight towards a player.
For Brigador Killers, one feature we are working on is a sixth in uence
map called Gun re. The intent for Gun re is when bullets or artillery shells
y through a node, it will increase its “gun re” value, enabling enemy AI toreact to, say, the concept of suppressive re. We’re doing this because
the scale of units for BK is increasing, going from 40 ft tall walking mechs
stomping through entire buildings, to street-scale encounters. People
don’t act like armored vehicles, so we need to introduce new behaviors,
like running for cover, or crouching. If you’ve ever seen the mainshootout from 1995’s Heat directed by Michael Mann, where theprotagonists violently escape through a blockade by ring an excessive
amount of gun re, that’s the kind of reactive gameplay we’re hoping toemulate.
Currently we have what’s called a naïve implementation of the system
which has, uh… had an interesting e ect as can be seen in a GIF in thisrecent tweet from Hugh. What’s going on here is the Gun re in uence
map is being shared between player and enemy, so the enemy’s own shotswithin its node are then spooking their allies into ducking each time theyre. To x this, we’ll probably split the Gun re in uence map into two –one for the player and one for the enemy faction – so that enemy units
are not negatively a ected by their allies’ gun re.

Brigador Updates ICYMI

Check this Steam news post if only to get yourself some high resolution
desktop wallpapers. The TL;DR is the nal content update for Brigador has
been shelved for a later date, and instead we spent the rest of 2021
working on BK's development instead. We have also deployed a small
patch to x an issue with Retina displays on MacOS that will stop the gamefrom taking up only a quarter of your screen.

Merchandise Prices Will Go Up (Eventually)

There was a brilliant response to our holiday sale, so we'd like to thankeveryone that bought merchandise and hope you enjoy your purchase.

Unfortunately, everything in the shipping & freight industry was a ected
in 2021 due to covid, such as increased manufacturing costs, a volatile
freight rate market, port shutdowns, as well as logistics pricing increases.
What this means is we will have to raise prices on both our existing
merchandise and the associated shipping costs. Currently we're doing
another run of various items to stock our digital shelves back up, and avery rough estimate is future orders will likely cost at least 10% morecompared to current values, but this sum will vary by destination country
and item selection.
Please understand that this price increase will not happen
immediately, nor do we intend to cause any sort of panic buying either.
Instead, we're giving everyone about two months' notice before we makeany increases, and next month we hope to have a more exact idea of what
is increasing, and by how much. Until that happens, our store is still open
for business.
Browse store

Community SpotlightIf you've never set foot in our Discord's #maps-and-modding channel why? You're missing out on the huanglong's apparent war against ourgame's framerate...meanwhile MikeMurdock gave us a spin on the recent meme from
Smiling Friends...

Look, Dirt Eater
I know it's our job to help this guy and everything, but I think this guy
is a lost cause. He has obviously made up his mind. Why don't we justcut our losses and get out of here?

...Lastly, Clade Ligma Scout has been showering #design-bureau with avariety of cursed images to celebrate the new year - here's just one ofthem.

Remember: this is only a handful - the #becks_best channel on ourDiscord server has many more posts for you to enjoy.
Join Our Discord Server

Next Month

February's still 28 days in 2022, but hopefully we'll have an updated merch
price list for you and some other news about upcoming changes forBrigador Killers.

Stellar Jockeys

112 N Neil St Apt D, Champaign, IL
United States
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