Gnomad: Room Loading

The goal for me this week was to begin implementation of the dynamic room loading system. Given the large scale of the world of Gnomad, we will certainly run into performance issues if we tried to load the entire game world at once.

To get ahead of the performance issues, Gnomad will be designed with this in mind. Zones will be sequestered into discrete rooms that will be loaded depending on which room the player is in. The system will then also load adjacent rooms. When the player leaves their erstwhile occupied room, the system will unload the no longer adjacent rooms and load in the rooms that are now nearby.

To accomplish this, each scene will contain a GameObject in a ScriptableObject with the following structure:

public class SceneInfo : ScriptableObject
{
    public SceneReference scene;
    public IDictionary<int, int> IntIntDictionary
    {
        get { return DoorConnections; }
        set { DoorConnections.CopyFrom(value); }
    }
    public List<SceneInfo> adjacentScenes;
    public bool isLoaded { get; set; }
    public List<GameObject> DoorPositions;
    public IntIntDictionary DoorConnections = new IntIntDictionary{ { 0,0 } };
}

There are a number of technical descisions made in the class so allow me to elaborate. We decided that it would be best to avoid using strings or integers to refer to the scene. Instead we use Scene References. These are useful because a Scene asset can be dragged into the inspector and the handy Unity Add-on will handle the renaming process by automatically reassigning the relevant asset information for the Scene.

As for why we’re using a seemingly strange class named IntIntDictionary, Unity - rather infamously - does not natively support Dictionary serialization. So we opted to go with this solution Each key and value will contain the index of the door in the door positions list in the the current room and adjacent room’s door.

That might have been confusing, since I confused myself writing it. Here is a code snippet that demonstrates its purpose:

Vector3 doorPosition = sceneInfo.DoorPositions[idx];
// Get the other door's index from the door connections dictionary
var otherDoorIdx = sceneInfo.DoorConnections[idx];
/*
   get the other scene info from the adjacent scenes based on the index that we got.
   this means that the value position in the adjacent scenes
   list must match what value we put in the door connections dictionary 
   other wise it will load the wrong scene.
*/
var adjacentScene = sceneInfo.adjacentScenes[idx];
/* 
  get the doorposition that we want to connect to in the other scene
  Same consequence as above. Door position idx must match 
  adjacent scene idx and doorposition value.
*/
var otherDoorPosition = adjacentScene.DoorPositions[otherDoorIdx];

The rest of the properties are simple enough, isLoaded stores whether the room is currently loaded, adjacentScenes keeps track of the adjacent room scenes, and DoorPositions keeps track of the empty GameObjects that we place in the center of every door entrance.