Sunday 14 August 2011

Back from holidays!

The last month has been a little slow on development as I've had a couple of weeks of holiday, leaving me feeling refreshed and possibly even a little tanned.

The most important recent update is that scripted animated objects are now up and running properly.  This means that doors (and any other environment object) may be animated by script strings, meaning that proper game interaction is now possible to generate, such as the player's craft needing to move to a specific location within the world and activate an object (which then executes the script) in order to open the door.  These scripted objects are properly integrated into the physics engine, such that they impart appropriate force to any dynamic objects they collide with during their animations. 

Now, the primary focus is on further development of the AI algorithms for the swarm, such that they can spot the player's ship and attack appropriately, including chasing them through the environment and performing proper route-finding.  The basic navigation node structure is already complete and searchable, the main weakness is the lowest-level control i.e. correctly navigating between nodes without going out of bounds and colliding with the world.

I'm currently holding off creating a new video for a while until there are enough visible differences to make the recent updates apparent.  Also, I had it pointed out to me recently that in all the videos so far I've been playing the game really badly (purposefully), mainly to show off collision particle effects etc., but I'll make sure on the next one to actually fly around normally!

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