Cute Warbands Doing Cute Warband Things

 

Smoke Signals, telling Yogi Bear the picnic table is occupied

So after much huffing and rather a lot puffing, and even more debugging ... warbands are running about doing warband things, in both day and night!

Warbands now move around from loot point to loot point, doing the lootening, as loot points suggest may happen, and light the bonfires on said loot points to signal to all nearby that the lootening is occurrening - and that this would also be a great time to raid that said specific loot point and try and slaughter all within to loot their loot.

Did I mention loot? 

 Well the player can now loot corpses, which was a main aim of the gameplay, and not only can he swipe the swag that the fallen is clad in, stripping them down to their underpants, he also buries said unfortunate recently deceased, leaving a small gravemarker to mark their passing. Failure to loot and bury said dearly departed, results in their equipment being lost to eternity, and their corpses rotting away to leave a skull, marking their departure from this earthly plane.

The Freshly Slain

 

The Not So Fresh After Remaining Unburied

I had a play around with the ScatterSky and TimeOfDay objects, and after some faffing in the code, decided the easiest way - at least in network overhead - to get really red dusks and dawns, was to use the built in TimeOfDay callback with a little custom C++ to change to change the rayleigh scattering and ambient colour. This callback also allows for the campfires to light up on sunset and extinguish at dawn, giving more markers as to places the warbands are likely to head. View distance for the warbands changes according to the time of day, and leads to some rather nasty surprise battles during the hours of darkness, when bands or burley warriors bump into each other in the pitch black.

 Archery now works rather nicely, though required considerable faffing due to the blending of animations for aiming, which threw off the IK animations which I had created for use with two-handed pole weapons (hello Dane Axe). After many huntings through C++ to try and find out WTF was going on (I still think it's all down to the laterally animation movement which the engine isn't expecting) it turned out easier to define a specific look/head arm animation for pole weapons and then manually alter the animation to get it to align to the IK by around -4 degrees on the XZ axis. Not the cleanest way of getting a working result but game development, and inface coding in general seems to be very much to be a matter of workarounds and use more duct tape. And duct tape fixes everything! (as long as you use enough)

Here's a test of leading aim with longbows at just short of 300m, which works a lot better on a flat surface than undulating terrain for obvious reasons of consistent direction and velocity.

 Currently all bows look like crossbows, due to this being the only model and animations I have currently made, whilst I decide on how best to animate traditional bows, with their hold in left and draw with right animations. As my current warband timeline only goes up the 11th Century at the moment, the English warbow/longbow has yet to appear, but researching some historical composite bows for the Magyars, it was interesting to  note that they used very light arrows on very strong composite bows to out-range their enemies at the expense of projectiles which were weaker in the strike, and would break when they hit the ground (which of course stops the guy you just missed from picking it up and shooting it back). To this result, the Magyar have by far the longest range (to be honest 400m is kinda pushing it but hey vidya gaemz), but with stopping power only marginly better than a 100m short bow.

Remember kids, when you see the horse archers run away, do not follow. 

 So, here's some edited highlights of archery, melee, point blank night battles, corpses rotting to skulls, and general AI powered gameplay in action.

 So all that leaves us with our not so heroic player, still running about in his underpants armed only with a Bollock Dagger.

Nice lack of kit you have there oh level 1 noob

 But, as shown in the first video far above, the player can actually loot corpses of their equipment, armour and weapons. So the next major job is to come up with a Game User Interface (GUI) so that the player can actually decide what stolen swag they want to equip, to boost their avatar's chances of survival in a good old fashioned scrap. Alongside that, I need to create interfaces for the leveling system and career progression, all of which is already coded, but currently inaccessible due to lack of tailor made input screens.

Behold, The Wonder Of Clothing! Coming Soon™

 

Speaking of input screens, I modified the visual performance settings, so things liek groundCover (that's grass to most people) not only increases and decreases in number, but also expands and ... er ... despans(?)  in range from the camera. I found that there was already a variable for this, originally created in mind to reduce the range, but with a little tweaking of code I could get the radius to which grass is drawn on screen to increase/decrease in line with element numbers.

In other news some dastardly swine stole an hour of my sleep in return for British Summer Time, so I sat out in the sun with a bottle of wine, and it was freezing cold and cloudy and I probably now have hyper/hypo-thermia ... which ever one involves a brass monkey dropping it's balls all over the place.
 

An Arrow To The Knee But Then I Raised The Aimpoint

 

 I used to be an adventurer like you, but then - whizzzzzz ack! Since this video there is a cool motion trail effect courtesy of a ribbon particle behind each arrow as it cuts through the air.

So archery has been somewhat missing as I have been concentrating on devising an animation led melee combat system. This now work rather nicely (except when it inexplicable doesn't play the prepAttack animation and I have to throw in a safety call to get it back on track) so it was time to get on to ranged weaponry.

Cue Clannad and the greatest decade in history, the 1980s.

 Now, because I've upended the whole stock animation system, it turns out that mouse aiming system no longer works, because who wants mouse aiming to override a melee based animation system? Well no one, so that will take a bit of looking into to fix. However the actual aiming and shooting works, even if the AI and client Player doesn't currently animate correctly to look like it, due to the removal of most of the blend animation code.

I have a variety of ranged weapons coded, both differing sizes of bows and crossbows, with bows requiring greater stats in both STRength and DEXterity for use which make them much more expensive in XP spend to use, but having hugely quicker reloading than crossbows. 

Projectile damage is based on a singular strike to the target's hitboxes, so whilst a heavy melee attack can cause damage to multiple hitboxes with a wide slashing motion, arrows cause damage based on range to target to simulate increased velocity from loosing up close and the archer's ability to pinpoint weak areas in the target's defences. Getting struck at maximum range whilst wearing a full harness is most likely to plink off, but getting shot up close with 300lb of draw weight is another matter.

The main level has had a bit of a revamp, with more trees and shrubs in the open side of the map, but there is still plenty of nice open space for longbows to wreak havoc. 

I also converted my AiPlayer routines to use the new stock engine AiController system, which can be attached to any playable class including those usually restricted to clients, to turn them into Ai controlled - hence the new classname. This class has a lot of dynamic avoidance and automatic repathing systems, but even without those I found it to be very heavy on processing. Whilst still useful for being able to control the usual client based objects, it's clearly something to be used sparingly, and to keep the standard Ai based classes to themselves.

Archery is pretty much the final part of the Ai warbands and battle system, and with it now functioning materially (if not animating aiming perfectly) I need to integrate it's use into the AiPlayer combat routines. The most obvious example is for a warband that outranges an opponent is for them to stop, hold fast, and pepper the enemy at distance whilst they themselves seek to move to attack.

Whilst this is all in the works, here's a video of meeting engagement between the Norse and the Magyars, the latter of whom will be one of the more heavy ranged weaponry factions in the future.

 Aside from fitting archery into the individual AiPlayers' combat routine, I need to come up with a method of allowing the player to use archery effectively, regardless of their third person rotatable camera system. The obvious cop-out here would be to follow Elden Ring's lead and switch to first person for aiming. Maybe I can come up with something else which retains the third person view ... ?

Speaking of the player, to be honest they haven't really got a lot to do at the moment, as all my efforts have centered around making the AiPlayer's work as cohesive raiding parties, so next up after I tackle the blended aiming animations, is to give the actual client player something to play.

It's February, and it's ending early, somebody stole 2 extra days that I could have been coding! 

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 ...