Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Plague 3.34 redux

I'm just uploading 3.34 again. I was mucking around with the smoke and opaque smoke costs a ridiculous amount of CPU time. I have therefore set smoke opacity to zero, and now Plague runs nice and fast - smoke is just eye candy now. Gutted. Anyway, if you get the source version you can put make opaque smoke (simdata.py line 1499).

Monday, June 29, 2009

Plague 3.34

It's been a long time since my last release! (I've been playing Gothic3. Sacred2, Prototype, Viking, Too Human in my weekends). That said, I think I'm through most of the games I want to play, so we should be back on track for regular development of plague.

Plague 3.34 changes:
  • Survivor AI now essentially event based where possible
  • Survivor squads added back in (use "V" to issue orders). It's not perfect, but it works good enough for this release.
  • I've added a Rocket Launcher (so much fun) - it needs decent art and sounds...
  • I've added smoke to explosions that is (poorly) physically modelled - yeah, it's really slow, but its kinda cool to look at and it obscures vision (I need to cleanup the collision code to become event based to help speed this up)
  • Survivors now dont bump "hard" into each other, and I'm reasonably satisfied with the friendly collisions now
  • Survivors dont get hurt by bullets, and they dont check their fire. This means you can shoot safely past friends, which is a major change. I basically got sick of trying to sort out formations not blocking your line of fire and decided this was an easy quick fix. I might change this back in the future once formations work well again
  • Loads of small code fixes/cleanups
  • I've changed the players avatar color to be easier to differentiate (I was finding it hard).


Monday, June 1, 2009

Plague 3.33

The survivor AI has had a comprehensive rewrite. Survivors now remember the state of the map and utilise this information while they prioritise actions, and they plan their journeys accordingly.

I have disabled survivor formations and orders for this release (I'm out of time this weekend). I'll add that back in the near future.

I'm not convinced the state machine I've designed is the best one possible (I'm fairly sure there's a couple more rewrites from me as I gain more experience/need more performance). If anyone has experience with writing state machines or planning state managers and wants to help out with designing and/or coding, I'd love to hear from you.