Update #32 (Animations & Free-roam AI) (Patreon)

Hey Everyone!

We've got some exciting free-roam AI news to go through this week! Although nothing is set in stone we have some big developments on a fully free-roam AI system to be used in "Childhood Memories"! (Continued in "The Details")

**Note: We apologize for the delay in content the past week! Being able to juggle the much-increased development speed along with consistent content on here has proven to be difficult:/ But going forward this week we should see all content arrive on-time! :)

Highlights:

⋅ Jumpscare polishes!

⋅ Free-roam AI developments! (more in the details)

⋅ New Animation polishes!

⋅ Waterpark Environment Overhaul progress (90% done)

⋅ Procedural Chase and Cutscene Complete!

⋅ Seamless level structure optimizations!

Coming Soon:

⋅ (Delayed) Full Team Announcement! (Coming Thursday! 12/21 ) (All new devs, animators, etc)

⋅ (Delayed) Footstep Foley Poll! (Set for Friday! 12/22)

⋅ (Delayed) Challenge System, Storyline, And Release Announcement! (Set for Friday! 12/22)

⋅ Waterpark Overhaul Finish! (Leak coming between Friday - Sunday this week!)

⋅ More Optimization tests! (Coming within this week!)

⋅ Lots more Animation work along with new VFX work!

⋅ OST, Foley, and SFX Work!

⋅ Lots more free-roam development work!

The Details (For Nerds):

Let's jump into some code!

This week a main focus of ours has been fleshing out a full free-roam AI system to handle an AI Chase portion of the main challenge in "Childhood Memories".

First let's gather a big picture: For this system, we wanted the AI (Entity) to search for us, lock onto our location, and navigate through the Play structure naturally to find us (this is going to be a very big focus). We also want them to have the ability to lose sight of us and search for us naturally, but for now let's stick to the main pursuit part of the AI.

The first step we need to take here is getting a basic AI Character setup, and after creating a quick character BP and adding some stock pawn sensing we quickly have a nice starting platform that is able to detect where we are once we step into their FOV.

Now comes the first tedious part of setting up our new AI system... Fleshing out an accurate nav mesh that will allow our AI to navigate the play structure in a natural non-corner hugging fashion & up and down stairs and ramps. And, after lots of nav mesh tweaks through modifier volumes and nav links, we've got a pretty smooth-looking nav mesh for our AI! We can stop now and run a few tests with our procedural animation system and see how our basic entity navigation through corridors is going to look... (Sadly we decided to keep this under wraps for now:/ )

(The Exciting Part)

Next, as our final step we'll go though here today and our last big addition to our AI's pursuit navigation, let's get to mixing in some custom animations around corners, in tube slides, and around unique geo to get us some more variability and natural-looking momentum! We've tried a few approaches to this this past week, but our main approach we are expanding on now starts out with setting up some unique triggers though out the Playplace right before our animations will get blended in. We can then setup up our AI to sense these triggers depending on which direction they are moving in and set off events that will seamlessly blend our procedural animation into a predefined animation at a certain point, and then again blend back into our procedural animation as our set animation reaches its end. After we setup all triggers we now have a pretty well-animated and natural-looking pursuit for our AI! (with admittedly quite a few bugs and issues we'll be getting to in the coming weeks)

Next week we'll hopefully get into some randomized search for our newly made AI!

Until then,

Cheers!