Belated Blog

Friday was mostly a day of 'further work' which included adding some helpful text to the download system to inform new users what to do with the dialog. More great progress on the software occluder and a video from Dave at the last hour shows just how cool it really is. I am going to postpone showing you guys any of this until it is in the engine I can reveal some real metrics and how much performance you can expect to gain in different scenarios. My own coding antics have been to strip out an AI module and create an integratable prototype so Dave can start the character AI work in earnest next week. It meant I had to remove my clever staircase, ladder, container and hard coded combat logic from the engine, but it also means we have a relatively blank canvas on which Dave can work his magic. Dave has been a games developer as long as I have, and his passion has always been 'games' creation, and unlike me, has continued to play all the best games over the years. He's the go-to guy for ensuring the game play is top draw and my work will hopefully allow him to focus on behaviors rather than the boring stuff like animation and movement. During the strip out of the AI module, I have left in the clever stuff that is still relevant which allows the characters to move and animate in a controlled way, so that foot planting is perfect and all the extra moves such as ducking, crawling, leaping over things combine animation and movement in a single system. It means when Dave's AI system wants an enemy to jump over a sandbag, dive for cover, throw a grenade and run like hell, it's just a few flags!  We also sorted more player water interactions so that you can 'sort of swim for a bit', but slowly sink, then your head goes under water and you start to drown slowly. This will be the initial implementation until we explore water properly with underwater scenes, diving, exploring, e.t.c. A pretty packed end of the week and the following week should prove the best yet as occlusion goes in, DarkAI moves to LUA and LOTS more tweaks happen!!