Week 29

Hello Everyone,

This week in development we focused on flushing out the dialogue system, AI platform navigation, some bugs, and code improvements. 

The dialogue system is now able to create chaining sequences of triggers making it easier to construct and control the narrative flow in a mission. To test this we are taking our current tutorial level and converting it to use the dialogue systems triggers in an effort to dog food the system before putting it in the hands of our writer.

Last week we showed the AI constructing sets of buildings together and this week we started work on navigating those platformed buildings across a level. We investigated using a specialized Jump Point Search (JPS/JPS+: http://www.gameaipro.com/) algorithm but have instead decided to fall back to a simpler A star that uses a predicate to qualify spaces before enqueuing. As a side benefit of the pre-computed information we use for this new navigation predicate, we should also see an improvement in moving platforms around.

Additionally, the team continued to transition away from Unity's physics system and onto our own tracking system. This should improve performance in the game while also giving us a bit more control over the game data.


Hope you're all having a great week,

Micah Rust