Posted December 02, 2025 by LtTim
The biggest part of this update was setting up the entity spawner system. i wanted to make a flexible system that would work for any entity, set a target number of entities to create over time, and that could easily be placed in the 3d modeling program to place in a level seamlessly. i haven't tried the latter part, but the former is working perfectly! however, i noticed a big issue with my approach to adding animated model to entities.
See, the thing about Isodun is that all of the 3d assets are being loaded from a CDN - content delivery network, no 3d models, or other assets actually, are stored in the game files, instead they're pulled from a URL and loaded that way. Because of this, i can't directly modify the models much, meaning unlike in Unreal, Unity, or Godot, i can't actually place objects directly in an editor. Instead, i leverage the GLB format of the models to look for objects named a certain thing, like for example DEN_RAT_10, to understand a den (entity spawner) that spawns the entity Rat, needs to be placed in an area and aim to maintain a total amount of 10 rats for that den. That object is programatticaly added to the scene using the position of the asset. Now, this gets to part where the issue arose, previously i had been giving an animation mixer to the entity and letting it attach the associated model to the entity and playing the animations, but i didn't realize that this was the sole copy that was being made, and all other entities that wanted to use the model and animations weren't making their own copy, but stealing the model from the other entities.
So after about a whole day of debugging, i finally figured out a solution and now my beautiful rats are frolicking and eating potatoes!