Hello Kine and Kindred alike! As the day approaches, here’s some good progress going on. This week, most of the focus was put on the UI, the lobby system and AI.
Ai
Development on the AI continues, but since we’re building it from scratch, we’re experimenting with various ways on improving it from the original game, making them perform well.
Right now we’re experimenting with the monster AI since we’re still getting the weapon management to be set up for the multiplayer which we’ll be adapting to NPCs as we progress. The way the models and animations were setup in Source require some extra work and since we are using legacy animation (more about it later), we’ll have to resort to blending them in various layers, which is near perfect and will probably be replaced once Mecanim suits all of our needs.
Monster AIs are great to experiment with because they resort on a few states to get the behave as intended without worrying too much on the visual part, such as the animation layers and other movement blending. Almost all monster AIs use a “forward path” movement which means they’ll be moving towards you and start attacking you without much strafing.
Since we’re doing basic AI right now, we are planning on using dynamic pathing using A* AI. This gives us three main focal points for our AI navigation system:
1.) A* pathfinding
2.) AI scheduler (for more realistic ambient NPC example, people going to the diner, walking to the club, random alley fight, etc)
3.) The use of cone of vision, line of sight, auditory sphere of influence for reacting to environment sounds are a few to.
The A* will prove all the needed features so the NPCs can intelligently follow the player through complex layouts of a map.
The way Troika originally created the NPC system is far from being perfect, from having them write their own AI code from scratch in such short time lead them to create an AI system with huge ambition but little time to improve. Improving the AI pathfinding can improve the life of the game a lot, creating a more dynamic environment populated with NPCs that can perform far more tasks than just move between points. We’re excited to bring more news regarding the AI system in the near future.
UI Concept
We have some great news for everyone! We have a new team member, Teemu the UI master. He’s got some really nice concepts already done, here’s a few:
Multiplayer Lobby
Stephen will be working on setting up a page for user registration to test the alpha multiplayer build, which should be available within the next week, so stay tuned for that. With that said, his next step is to work with Teemu on a UI for a lobby system to match users to game rooms.
We use Photon for our networking service in our current implementation of Vaulderie. We’re pretty much happy with what it can offer. The multiplayer lobby will mainly serve as a way for players to coordinate efforts, game managers can create a room, and lock it to a particular troupe, or Coterie.
Summary
The pace is starting to keep up once more, as we’re ready to get back in full throttle. Keep your eyes open as well for some multiplayer and backend news next week. Also be sure to keep an eye for new editor updates to come in the near future.