New Playable Character STARSHIP

 

New Playable Character STARSHIP brings the 1950s sci-fi vibe

Monsters Loot Swag got a new update on Steam, with the seventh playable character - and third unlockable - STARSHIP, who arrives with a cheesy 1950s sci-fi vibe. Duck Dodgers eat your heart out.

Starship is a high mobility and range-based character, and the only Monsters Loot Swag character who can truly run-and-gun without needing to slow down and aim to shoot.

And here she is in action.

And whilst we're talking about sci-fi cheese ... feel free to sing-a-long with ex-Pan's People cum Hot Gossip dancers, which I had on 45 speed vinyl ... which was a thing when I was a kid. I pity the younglings these days who will never know such joys as Gen-X took for granted.

 They don't make them like that anymore ...

Lord and Protector Gaben released a new Steamworks SDK build, which streamlined how player stats and achievements were obtained by the game app, with all player statistics now loading via the Steam Client before the game is even launched. Naturally thsi broke all my code which communicated with Valve's servers, so that had to be fixed ... especially for Airship Dragoon which meant hunting through C++ which I had written over 10 years ago ... whew lad.

10 years later and Airship Dragoon has achieved "Mostly Positive" reviews

And it wouldn't be a devblog without complaining about the weather! Err Nerr Snerr!

It didn't last long, just long enough for me to almost go arse-over-tit on an icy path, before a tropical storm came in and rained winter off again.

Monsters Loot Swag and Airship Dragoon are both on sale in the Steam Autumn Sale right now.

Next up, probably the final playable character for Monsters Loot Swag, after which I only have the last level to make and a few extra bits to tidy up before full release next year.

Many Many Things

Homegrown Pumpkins vs Big Pumpkin Corporation

Many things have happened this month, many, many things ... however I cannot remember most of them. Not the most auspicious start to the monthly devblog is it?

Monsters Loot Swag got another update on Steam.

Many of those many things are maths, and I'm certain non of them were helped by my filter coffee machine going the way of the dodo. Naturally it waited until it was a year out of warranty befoer it decided to pine for the fjords, but pine it did. The light was came on but nothing useful happened, a feeling which I can relate to.

The Median Between 2 Vectors

 I had spent a good week fighting maths, wondering why I was seemingly receiving a torrent of gibberish - when I realized that I had forgotten to normalize the first returning vector. Rookie mistake, but with that out of the way I suddenly found more of them, and some of those had been lying in my older code for some time ... like the one were the formula was clearly missing half of the maths that the code comment was describing. Needless to say, everything that ended up being based off this function was gibberish but I just hadn't noticed ...

Eventually I managed to get the AI to try and surround the player and attack from the sides. This still led to a lot of wild swinging of swords which meant rather a lot of whacking their own team mates. They do not fully envelop the player, but at least make a decent attempt at out numbering for multiple attack directions. I might end up making the combat a little like Sleeping Dogs, where the player is attacked in a quick but orderly manner rather than the current free for all. I speeded up the thought process of the AI after I made the test video below.

I've also hammered a good 200 hours of play in Kingdom Come Deliverance, which I bought some time ago. The graphics are nice, the forests really well made, the dialog is witty and the first person melee combat autistic and janky - but I have had a lot of fun as a Cuman bowman riding around on a horse and nailing arrows into folks.

It's that time of the year again!

I bought 2 supermarket pumpkins, as the homegrown variety didn't quite get big enough to scoop out. I got a kilo of vegetable flesh from each one, so 2 kilos for 3 quids worth of pumpkin, now bagged up and in the freezer ... where I found some bags of last year's pumpkin ...

Anyhow, here's the WORLD DEBT CLOCK - don't have nightmares!

Autumn Arrives And Ai Attack

 The big Summer fan has been put away - not that it got much use anyway - and the Autumn duvet (which is just a second Summer duvet doubling up) is out. The slow cooker has been dusted off for comfy one pot meals, and the hot water bottles are at the ready.

And it finally rained, and my parched veg patch was happy, and all the water barrels got filled up, and now it won't stop raining and the veg patch is flooding.

Code wise, I've been working on my Melee Combat Demo, getting the Ai to fight one another.

The first problem was, well, the other Ai, and them getting in the each others way. In Monsters Loot Swag this was a more simple problem, as I could just have them jostle each other out of the way, with a variable to succumb to any charging monsters who were "coming through no matter what", like bosses.

In Melee Combat Demo I don't really want to shoving everyone and everything out of the way so much, especially if all the people in front of Mr.Ai are already engaged in combat. It's not very helpful to shoving your comrades onto the sharp pointy bits of your foes' weapons.

I came up with a simple; "is there a better target?" check. And if not; "can we easily get around the side?" of the queue in front of us, and if not then just wait. And if no useful data comes back, then to hell with it and go charging through like a bull in a china shop.

Ai use an alert system for readiness, which decides on how fast their thinking routine is called. It starts off at "chilled", increases to "look for trouble" and hits the summit of "oh shit things are kicking off" ... also known as 1 to 3. All these schedules for looping the think routine are modified by the skill or leveling of the Ai, and that is currently based on what weapon rank they are using.

Starting alert looks to do something, but at the moment all I want them to do is test combat, so they move to search mode and head towards any enemy that they can find. There is a brief lull between this and going into combat alert which means that in the test they do make physcial contact between the two teams before all hell breaks loose.

And here is the result of the testing, after I inserted many, many lines of debugging to the console to find out which bits of my maths were bad. Team Bill the blocky blue guys massacre Team Bob the purple-ish LODed guys with a score of 5-2.

Needs more work but it's a decent start and at least does work as team based melee combat.

In non-dev news, I actually played a game recently - shock horror.

Not since Ace Combat 7 came out have I actually played anything, but I got Kingdom Come Deliverance on sale some time ago, and took a couple of weeks out to hammer a good 130 hours into  it. I wasn't really playing the story much, just bimbling around medieval Bohemia accidentally finding side quests and generally shooting bad guys with arrows to slow them down and then stabbing them in the neck if they got too close. It's a strategy I'm sure worked in the 15th century too.

The game world is quite pretty to look at, the first person combat is autistic but passable.

So to the future, more getting Ai melee combat to work nicely, and then start thinking about equipping the characters with more kit. I'll probably also start thinking about making another playable character to be unlocked in Monsters Loot Swag, and probably complain about the weather more, but that's probably called sport to my Saxon blood. Also three probably's in one sentence is terrible grammar, so I'll probably stop writing there ...