I’m a complete noob and want to eventually make myself a semi-realistic beekeeping simulator because I miss beekeeping(gave it up because I can’t maintain them well while looking after an infant) and don’t see anything like that on the market currently.
I’m just taking first steps and following tutorials. I want to start applying what I’m learning but can’t wrap my head around how to make what I want. I want to make a frame (bee hive frame) with hexagonal cells. Obviously it doesn’t need to be hyper-realistic but if I work on creating a single cell, to make it even remotely realistic, Each frame would have a possible 100+ cells. I’m definitely not an expert but I’m going to guess it would not be a good idea to treat each cell as a different component. Right?
What I want to do is have fixed POV on a side of a bee frame without anything on it for now so I can work on coding different events.
For example let’s say a bee frame is 10x5 cells and each cell has a chance of being one type or another. If I treat each cell as a node, am I right? Would this be poorly optimized and too much to do?
Am I over-estimating what that would take?
Does anyone have any suggestions for how to think about this?
This is a common anti pattern: premature optimisation. Try it! Run into the problem, if it’s actually legit, fix it.
Also, unrelated but out of curiosity:
What makes beekeeping take time? I always assumed you have a hive, they fly out and make honey. I’m apparently poorly informed about beekeeping so I’d like to learn.
If 2D cells are okay, you can use a TileMapLayer with hexagonal cells, like below (I believe GridMap can do the same in 3D). It’s very lightweight, and you can make the cells clickable etc… I’m sure my code is not up to everyone’s standards, but I’ll happily share it if you like
During the warm seasons they do fly out and make honey
With no human intervention the hive will fill up their space(boxes), make queen cells, then 2/3 of the hive will leave. This is how hives reproduce and/or multiply. Re-queening is often fine but once the new queen hatches, she destroys the other queens before going on her mating flight. If she never comes back? The hive will slowly die with no queen to produce more workers. To prevent this you need to watch for signs of swarming on the brain closely and either prevent it or simulate it by forming 2 hives from the 1.
Poorly managed hives don’t just affect your hive. If you don’t monitor your hive closely, they can be developing and spreading diseases and parasites to other honey bees and even native pollinators in some cases. You need to test for, check for, and treat for these problems. Even a strong hive may not survive the winter with those kinds of issues and parasite loads. The main cause of the honey bee crisis is called varroa destructor mites. Look them up if you get a chance!
Ideally you should be in your hive I work from home M-F that puts management to the weekends only because going out in the late afternoon makes them mad lol. The “Bee-witching hours“ are basically 10-2. So that leaves Saturday and Sunday for me. If it rains, or is too windy and cold for those 2 days? They get mad and you risk killing developing larvae if they get too cold. If the Queen gets too cold, her stored sperm can be killed off and she can no longer produce worker eggs. Add on to this a infant/toddler with no ability to care for herself and can’t be left alone? Those 4 hours on those 2 days becomes smaller.
I never kept for the honey, I’m not particularly fond of honey. I just like bees I miss my girls .
So Ideally 3d? I’m thinking fixed POV with 3d image though so I guess it could go either way? I’m more comfortable with the art side of things. I need to find a balance. A real deep frame technically has about 3500 cells per side. Obviously not going for that level of realism but still lol. This kind of thing.
That’s what I was wondering! My thought is depending on the location within the frame, fiddle with the percentages so that it emulates how real bees would choose to fill it. I would be glad to see an example of something already working!
Brood in the middle, pollen in the open cells, and honey in the outermost cells.
Thanks! I don’t want to hijack your thread and go too much off topic, but that sounds like an engaging hobby for sure. I’ll do some more reading into it. Thanks for giving me another topic to learn about
Relatable, but then for game design. Which is much easier to plan around of course, but still makes it hard to find uninterrupted focus times outside of sleep schedules
It’s a problem regardless but I can work on and play games after she goes to bed lol. Can’t really mess with bees after a certain point and definitely not after dark. That’s asking to be stung! Look into Mason and Leaf cutter bees as well! I’ve got a small group of them on my porch lol. Thanks!
100+ cells seems a little too few, that’s only 10x10 cells. In your images there are guestimated ~50x~40cells = ~2000cells. I would set the target count higher than 100. At that amount it starts to get problematic with all cells as single nodes.
As they are not ordered in a simple grid, GridMap is not an option.
Maybe one Mesh with all the sides of the cells, and MultiMesh(es) for the different toppings and or eggs or larvae. Maybe all the cells as MultiMeshes, too. Limit the amount of visible lavae, if you want to animate them (vertex shader would be preferred).
Maybe if a cell has a topping, it’s possible to avoid to render the cell below.
EDIT:
I would suggest to manage the cells in an independent array from the visuals and generate the meshes based on that array. (or array of arrays, or dictionary)
Thank you! I’ll look into this some tutorials for those! The Larva don’t move much irl so I’m not planning to animate those. I do plan on putting some workers basically in the way but that’s a problem for another time lol. I think just getting a bee frame to generate is a big enough project for me!
@Spaceysm0m This is so cool, I love bees
I have recently watched Secrets of the Bees miniseries on Disney and felt inspired to quickly make a simple bee-themed project. I got a simple setup with bees spawning at the hive, looking for a flower, collecting the pollen and returning to the hive to store the pollen.
I’ve never gotten around to do anything more with it, it’s in a very rough stage, maybe some day I’ll return to the project.
Feel free to check out and take whatever you need from this project to inspire you.
And definitely share your progress! If you need anything - let me know, I’d love to help
Oh wow! That’s so cool By all means if you want to hit me up I would love someone to work with on it! I just want something for me to play and maybe as a free educational tool for people interested in beekeeping. Thank you so much!!
There was a hex based bee game made in Godot a few years ago Hive Time – Godot Engine
although seems that what you have in mind is more of a serious simulation.
It sounds like you need 3D, and I’m not sure how to go about that, but it can surely be done. I’ll message you my code, as it’s a fair bit of text, and I don’t want to be publicly shamed for my hobbyist coding habits
I’m a little bit inspired by the topic, too.
Tested my suggestions in a small test. Only 40 draw calls with MultiMesh. Can have holes in the cells.
I would welcome a thread under Showcase, where this topic could be developed further in a non help thread. If you like it.
.
