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.