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 ...