My original goal for the week was to make more room types for level 1 and add drag and drop controller support. I worked on the latter, and went off on a few tangents.
- Controller Support (Continued). Drag and drop support is mostly working. I’m still deciding how items and abilities should be added to the hotbar using a game controller.
- Fixed actor sight range issues. Actor sight ranges weren’t being properly calculated or visualized. There were a few separate bugs involved, but the most significant was a limitation in the method that determines the cells in a circle. The method’s radius parameter was an int rather than a float, so it couldn’t generate circles of certain sizes, such as a 3×3 circle around the actor (the radius needs to be the square root of 2 in this case).
- Removed panel positioning. It’s no longer possible to move panels around with the mouse. They’ll now appear in the center of the screen every time. There wasn’t a strong use case to display arbitrary multiple panels at the same time, though there are a few use cases for displaying specific combinations of panels such as the Inventory and Combine / Craft panels. The specific combinations are already supported.
- Enemy AI design. I need to reduce the frequency of combat encounters that take place at doors. I’m hoping to solve the problem with better enemy AI. I considered a few options this week but didn’t make any code changes. The current enemy AI is a combination of a decision tree and scoring (utility AI), with two versions: one for dumb enemies and one for smart enemies. Dumb enemies go straight to the player and attack. Smart enemies will take cover and reposition, but it doesn’t work great currently.
Next week, I’ll keep working on drag and drop controller support, enemy AI design, and adding room types to level 1.