Forensic Friday 47: Development Hell
Welcome to Forensic Friday Friday- Fri- F- day—– what -Pd- I don’t know—- RESTARTING… RESTARTING… RESTARTING… WELCOME BACK… Oops I seem to be broken, much like our development currently! But not to fret, we are merely overexaggerating. This week we have been stuck in the metaphorical hole of development hell. Hell because we are not enjoying ourselves in the slightest? Why? Rewrites and Bugfixes! That’s why! But as the week comes to a close, we are finally starting to climb out of the hole we dug ourselves by not researching effective designs for AI systems :/
Anyways, what’s important is the news! The news is both good and bad. Starting with the bad news: We are behind on the roadmap! But the good news: We are nearly done with revamping our NPC AI, and with that will come a significantly smoother development. With any new system, it takes a bit of beating in before its robust and reliable enough, which is what we have spent most of the week doing. A mountain of bugs and issues, is surprisingly a good thing, as it just means we are finding all the possible edge cases and extreme scenarios, and pushing our new AI system to the limit.
So in lieu of that… we will get back on the road(map) soon! We may need another week or 2, but hopefully in no more than 2 weeks time, the roadmap will resume in all its glory, and maybe at an accelerated pace.
Multithread pathfinding #
In other news… pathfinding is multithreaded. NICE. Or at least the code exists to support it, but it hasn’t been meshed into the game yet, but eventually it will make its way through!
Recreational Activities #
NPCs also now can watch TV, using the new AI system. Once all the bugs have been ironed out with the underlying system, this kind of activity could probably be done in half an hour (probably less) of development time which is a good feeling. This also led to a discovery that NPCs could see through walls placed diagonally to one another, so now NPCs detect if they can see a location using a modified version of Bresenham’s line algorithm that gets all tiles between themself and the location they are looking at correctly! Many thanks to this lovely blog post for the idea!
Anomaly Poll Winner #
And to end on, the anomaly poll winner for this week is… drum roll
S-0133 - “The floor between floors”: S-0033 appears as a completely normal elevator/lift from the outside. It can effect any lift by random. so doesn’t have one defined appearance. Using the effected lift allows access to a whole new floor, only accessible through the lift.
(sad 119 noises)
Many thanks to all that voted, and we’ll see you in the next Mechanical Monday in 2 weeks to show off the document in full!
Case Closed #
Time to file this case, and close it for good. Thanks for reading, and your patience. We hope to get back on the roadmap as much as you guys.
Case Closed.
The Team
Plasmarc Studios