Mid-Week Progress Report (Patreon)

Today's week has been one day shorter than what will be routine, but even still I made some good progress in the past couple days. As stated in my weekly goals, I had been working on improving detection. Unfortunately, it ended up being a bit deeper of a rabbit hole than I initially anticipated. 

Detection before was handled by just a simple line-of-sight check. It has since been expanded to gradually progress over time based on distance and how exposed you are. That was the easy part; the hard part was having the AI react to it.

AI was initially done using Game Creator's behavior module. The behavior tree for NPCs was kept very simple, but had issues. 

I ran into limitations with Game Creator when needing to pass information along, so I had to come up with an alternate. I had two solutions: write all the AI code in C# or use another asset; I chose the latter.

I converted the AI logic to Behavior Designer. I had worked with it before and enjoyed its API. It is much more powerful and robust, however I had to create some bindings for it. It wasn't hard but it was very tedious. The end result was a much more dynamic behavior tree, with the ability to write much more complex AI in the future.

But it was here when I ran into another problem: when the AI was chasing you, they'd get stranded off the nav mesh and would get stuck doing nothing. This was a game breaking issue.

Last week, I had worked on integrating A* Pathfinding Project, but ran into issues and kept it saved on the side. I re-merged it with few issues and now have significantly improved both the AI decision-making and path finding. 

Working on AI is absolutely miserable so I'm glad to be at a good stopping point. From your point-of-view, not much has really changed other than NPCs gradually detect you and now follow you. But I've set up a very solid system to build upon to be able to make more complex AI. I'll be shifting gears to work on swappable clothing for the remainder of the week. 

Look forward to seeing this in the next build! And once again thank you for your support!