Thursday 31 October 2024

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!