The Great Debugging

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 ... 

Space Year 2025 Comes To An End

There Is Gold In Them There Hills!

 Space Year 2025 comes to an end, and this month I have mostly been fleshing out the world of warbands. This has required some low poly rocks scattering at various intervals and a some ruins, bridges and castles. Gotta have a castle in a medieval hack and slasher.

Colourful Heather To Break Up The Monotony Of Green

 Whilst adding all these extra things help make the landscape more interesting, it also creates the more "stuff" means the more stuff for the Ai to walk into and get stuck. Behold navMesh for pathfinding!

Now it has been a good 10 years since I used recast, for Airship Dragoon, so I did need a bit of trial and error to get it to build reasonably sized grids. After a bit of pathfinding testing I determined it had a nasty tendency to fail to get to the target point on particularly long or complicated paths (bridge? What bridge?), and so ended up adding some waypoint markers which will (hopefully) act as a guide for the wonky path. However it looks like I will be having to check this manually as "we made a path but it doesn't actually go to the end point" does appear to happen some times, especially when a bridge is involved. 

Fun With Pathfinding

 

Apart from that it has been Christmas, which has required a certain amount of eat, drink and be merry ... all of which has been somewhat fatiguing and I will be glad to get back to normal service has been resumed and don't have to hear overly jolly Christmas music everytime I stop outdoors.
 

One Ruin, One Bridge, One Castle

Steam is having another NextFest at the end of February but I reckon that the time frame for getting a working demo out is too tight, never mind clearing the store and app review hurdles. I am not particularly concerned as I don't think that NextFest adds anything to discoverability and if you aren't already bringing your pre-collected audience over it's all potluck if you get a new following.

Bonfire Lit, Grace Touched, Do You Have A Permit For That Campfire, Etc

 Space Year 2025 comes to an end, and during it I made the final release of twin-stick catgirl carnage shooter Monsters Loot Swag and added NG+ ... neither of which garnered any attention and all visibility rounds expired long before they were used up. However that is just the nature of the beast now. 

So the plan from now on is smaller, faster development cycles leading to shipping every 18-24 months or so, rather than labouriously iterating on something on and off for a decade only to release and hope I make my 100 bucks steam app cost back. Knight Errant/Warband World/Whatever I am going to end up calling it, is the first test of this. Whilst Early Access did not garner any enthusiasm or bug reporting help, I am probably going to go down the Open Beta route and see if that helps gather any players, before perhaps another attempt at Early Access in the same vein as Vampire Survivors, sell it for a few bucks and then finish it off 6 months later.

Hello Space year 2026. 

World of Warbands

 

FromSoft eat your heart out

Work on an actual in-game level has proceeded, so my brave little warbanders of expendable warfighting warriors have somewhere to run about in that doesn't look like the default flat, grey plane when you load an empty level into the engine.

Grassy plains, perfect for archery - which I have not coded yet

 

To go with my low-poly warriors, I decided on a return to the art style of Airship Dragoon, and the same sort of colour scheme, eg: brighter and greater saturation of colours than drab old reality. It's still all very much a work in progress, as I was forced to spend a good week plus incapacitated after my lower back went one way whilst I went the other, and sitting for long stretches became unbearable.

You just know that there's gonna be a camp fire in here

Whilst I was planning on level desgin, I decided to relearn how to import heightmaps, specifically heightmaps from reality. To get DEM style heightmaps from around the world there are a few free websites available, such as https://tangrams.github.io/heightmapper/ which has the whole world as an open map and https://dwtkns.com/srtm30m/ which has it sectioned into blocks for convenience.

The Peak District from Spaaaaaaaace

 

The Peak District in Gaaaaaaame! With the heightmap overlayed as a texture

Whilst this all worked very nicely, I thought it was best to craft a level by hand and eye that would fulfill my needs for gameplay. So I created a land surrounded by mountains (the old trick to stop the player from falling over the edge of the world without needing to create the horror of invisible walls to block them in), with internal areas of flat plains (good for archery, which I have yet to code), rolling hills, scalable cliffs, marshy flatlands with small islands and dense woodland (good for ambushes).

Robin ... woo-hoo, the hooded man ... dun dun

As I say, all still a work in progress, I currently have a few models still to make, mainly rocks to give a bit of depth to the flat mountain sides, and various building parts. I am planning on module ruins, so I can have a Weathertop, and of course a bridge is needed to cross the deepest parts of the river, which will be a nice choke point when two or more competing warbands try to cross at once.

More than enough of the white stuff to bring the entire country to it's knees

 Autumn ends here, and it is officially meteological Winter. The UK has already had it's first taste of snow, a thing which happens briefly every November but for some reason is more than enough to bring the whole nation to the verge of hysteria and cannibalism. Remember when we ruled the world and strapping lads would volunteer to trek into the polar regions so they could show off how stiff their Imperial upper lips were whilst starving to death? Great days. We used to be a proper country. Now I was all a flap trying to get a mixed case of whiskies ordered before the budget went through last Wednesday - and don't even get me started on Christmas, I'm trying not to think about it.

So, next up is  finishing off the warband world, and then getting pathfinding operational, which is something I haven't tinkered with for a few years. After all, we don't want our hardened warriors ignoring the bridge and running straight into the depths of the river in full armour before a blow has landed ... them fleeing in routed disarray after a blow has landed and drowning in the river would be quite historically accurate though.