Week 20: Navigation to in-air destinations

I added support for in-air destinations!
This shows a brief fun bug I had, before I'd added logic to detect when the player had actually reached the destination for an in-air target.

tl;dr: I added support for navigating to in-air destinations when the click point is too far from a surface, and I added some small improvements to navigation preselection annotations.

What happened last week?

Highlights

• I added support for navigating to in-air destinations when the click point is too far from a surface.
• I added some small improvements to navigation preselection annotations.
• I make the player position/animation-frame prediction more faint when it is further in the future and less likely to be accurate.
• I make the player position/animation-frame prediction face the correct left/right direction more accurately.
• I show an exclamation mark over the player's head when starting a new navigation.

Laundry list

• Fix some small issues with edge trajectory and duration calculations.
• Fix some issues with checkbox scaling.
• Create a new data structure for storing the selection position as well as its nearby surface position and navigation destination.
• Remove some obsolete edge types, in preparation for supporting in-air destinations.
• Fix some small bugs relating to edge trajectory calculations.
• Start debugging an issue relating to an empty jump trajectory from a false-positive collision result.
• Add support for considering alternate possible collision state when colliding with an unexpected (highly oblique) surface normal.
• Compared performance with and without my new logic to consider alternate collision points.
• I actually saw a few less valid edges being returned when this new check is enabled, which is definitely not what should be the case.
• I should debug that later...
• Add special handling for edge calculations that end with a valid collision much earlier than anticipated.
• Require a min number of frames. If less than min, reject the edge.
• Update duration when edge calculation ends with collision with expected surface.
• Add support for in-air destinations.
• New annotations.
• New edge calculations.
• New navigation logic.
• Re-name edges and calculators to no-longer imply they must end along a surface.
• Update navigator to re-use selection-nearby-position-along-surface info in addition to the standard destination target point.
• Update size and cone-count of in-air destination indicator.
• Move path calculation and storage to PointerSelectionPosition.
• Calculate alternate jump-off points for in-air destinations, using nearby surfaces of a different side type, when the initial nearest-surface-attempt fails.
• The reason this was useful is because I have a scenario where I want to jump to an in-air position that is near the ceiling. I want to jump from a floor that is beneath this position. But, the closest position-along-a-surface is along a nearby wall, and jumping from that wall would cause the player to bonk their head on the ceiling, and then fall-short of the in-air target.
• However, this ended up not working out, since it can be the case that, even though I know I want to jump from a floor instead of a wall, the closest floor could actually be near-the-ceiling-and-to-the-side-of the target, or it could even be above the target, and either of these jump-off positions would be invalid.
• So I found another heuristic to use instead...
• Calculate the top-n closest jump-off points for in-air destinations, so that we can just use the closest that yields a valid surface-to-air edge.
• Add support for detecting edge-complete with in-air destinations.
• Fix Navigator to update paths for stale selections.
• Add path-optimization for in-air destinations, which could eliminate whole edges from the path.
• Add a flag for also optimizing paths during preselection.
• Fix bug with level-select screen still responding to keyboard events when closed.
• Show an exclamation mark when a player starts a new navigation.
• Render the player prediction ghost as faint and yellow when there is less confidence.
• Update player predictions to base player-facing-direction off of the actual edge instructions rather than just velocity.
• Fix issue with climb-down-wall-to-floor-edges cancelling navigation early when reaching the floor.
• Start adding support for auto-zooming and panning the camera out when the user is trying to navigate close to the edge of the game region (and back in if not).

What's next?

• Finish adding support for auto-zooming and panning the camera out when the user is trying to navigate close to the edge of the game region (and back in if not).

🎉 Cheers!