 |
| Initial attempts at Inverse Kinemetics proved imperfect |
So THE GREAT DEBUGGING of actually trying to get our warbands to operate in a terrain environment has begun. And the good news is that it has almost™ ended.
Mistakes were made, and the good news is that it wasn't all be me, but also the data libraries which I use >>> I AM LOOKING AT YOU RECAST PATHFINDING. And I'm not even using AI (lol!), imagine how much worse it could have been!
| So just pathfind across the RIVER OF DEATH and into the CLIFF OF IMPASSABILITY |
Recast Pathfinding is a great resource, so great that I wrote my own pathfinding plan function that actually bothers to check if the pathfinding plan gets anywhere near the pathfinding objective ... not that I want to completely write my own pathfinding system you understand because I am not batshit insane.
But I did come up with a system of fallbacks, now that my own function actually bothered to tell me that the pathfinding library had, what we would call in layman's terms; FAILED, but for some reason it thought was fine to deposit everyone wearing heavy armour into a deadly deep river with unclimbable cliffs was some sort of mathematical success.
 |
| I want to get into the middle of the castle |
Thankfully my own functions used something called basic reasoning that when the path ends hundreds of yards away from the goal position that it might actually have failed and we should try other things. Other things however still relied on Recast's "meh close enough" being ANYWHERE in the map rather than at the literal destination, so I came up with a level specific functioning system where I could direct the pathfinding to actual traversable waypoint paths to overcome the RIVER OF EVERYONE IS SINKING.
 |
| I want to get into the middle of the castle and I will use the waypoint on the bridge because I am forcing it to |
And then there was the whitespace ... admittedly this was all down to me in the script files but "whoa laddy!" hunting down all those "objID" != " objID" has been a right royal pain in the Prince Andrew. So my apologies for a lack of interest but low fps debug build video of my multitude of warband troopers running about undulating, river obstacled terrains, knocking seven shades of the brown stuff out of each other. You will just have to "trust me bro™" that it really does work.
I also attempted some IK shenanigans to get the player's feet to actual transform to uneven surfaces, and as you can see from the first image is worked great ... but only if you want to stand like a sugar plum fairy ... and movement wasn't much better either.
 |
| Speaking of SHENANIGANS! |
It had been brought to my attention, via SteamDB that Airship Dragoon had spiked in player count, a good 12 years after release.
Bizarre.
I had ignored this and thought that it must have been a bug, yet ... Steamworks verified the player count.
And the nations were somewhat surprising ...
 |
| I hope no-one is using this actual military tactics ... |
So ... there you go, highest consecutive play count ever, in 12 years ... so I'm thinking ... bots going for trading cards? Not sure anyone is buying those trading cards though ... so ... it's a mystery.
Anyhow, just like Skeletor memes, until we meet again! When I will (hopefully) have some video of my warband game in full action over a real playable landscape! Not that there is anything for the player to do yet, but hopefully human fleshoids aren't as prone to fubaring everything up as a machine.
Hopeful, ever hofepul ...
