Most of the improved AI and game event response was built out this week.
- Field of view for game events. Returns a list of the cells that can see an event. For each cell, the distance from the cell to the event is also calculated so that actor sight distance is taken into consideration.
- Game event notification optimization. Previously, each actor received a notification for each event, and then determined whether the event was in the actor’s field of view. Now, only the actors in the game event field of view are notified, and only a quick sight distance check needs to be done.
- Door opening and closing game event reactions. Actors now respond to doors that they can see open and close. They will walk to any door that opens or closes (other behaviors will be added in the future). This allows for player tactics like luring an enemy into a vulnerable location, or away from a guarded location.
- Preoccupied and Observing awareness levels. Actors in the former state must wait one turn before reacting to a game event. Actors in the latter state can react in the same turn. So, when the player enters a room with guards who are actively observing, the guards can respond immediately.
- Refactoring. Consolidated duplicate code and extracted some classes in the actor action code. I’ve been reading Clean Code and getting some good refactoring ideas.
- Optimizations and bug fixes. The recent changes introduced slowness and some undesirable behavior (enemies attacking each other, enemies attacking doors, enemies attacking dead enemies).
11/30 is the target date for Release 3. The goals of Release 3 have largely changed since it was originally scoped six months ago. The last milestone is completing the AI game event response system. I should be able to complete this in the coming week.
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