Hello there, lovelies! Martin is back in the building! Another week, another year, another dev blog!

I hope that each and every one of you had a wonderful holiday with friends and families.

With that said, let’s get back to the task at hand. It’s been about 3 days since I came back to work, but that does not mean that I have not gotten anything done. So let’s get over them now!

1. Shooting actual harmful bullets at the player.

If you remember from my earlier uploads, the AI did not have the ability to actually harm the players. It used ‘LineTraceByChannel’ to simulate the ability to shoot at the player. But now Joakim, bless his soul, have created a system for shooting actual bullets and a system that allows players and AI alike to deal and take damage. So how does it look?

It’s a rough diamond. Joakim will make it look amazing in no time, I’m sure of it.

2. Taking Damage by the player and a dying state.

Well… This is probably as straight forward as something can be. Hit the AI with enough bullets, its health reaches 0, it dies. Nothing more nothing less.

3. Multiple AI movements and behaviors are no longer synced.

What do I mean by this?
Well, if you copied the original AI multiple times and let them loose, they would do the exact same thing at the exact same time since they follow the same Behavior Tree. This would lead to stuff like:

If one of the AI spotted the player, they all would start shooting for no reason.
If one of the AI wants to fly towards the player, they all do it. Even if they are out of sight.
They all wanted to roam to the exact same spot every single time.

How can we fix such a problem?

Any questions?

4. Stop creating so many checkpoints!!!

Do you remember these things?

Each blue dot is a waypoint for the AI to follow so that he can get to his destination. The problem is, if the AI creates about 300 of those blue dots and travels so fast that he misses a dot… Well… Then the AI can spend an infinite time trying to get back to track. So what I had to do was to lower the calculations and the thread spawning the AI had to do for each task.

But how do you do that?

You simply go to the 3D pathfinder Mesh and change the performance settings from there. Since our game is going to be quite open, there is no need for the AI to calculate too much on where it shall go. So about 3 threads will do for now. (may be changed in the future depending on what the playtests say.)

So what can we look forward to next week?
Next week I shall have the AI tested on the network. To see if the AI is up for some player vs AI action in the future.
I shall, hopefully, have created a new flying system for the AI. A flying system that gives the AI the same flying rules as the player will face in the future.

And with that I thank you for your time! And I’ll see you lovelies next week!