roadtovostok

Dev Update (17/03/2024)

Added 2024-03-17 04:16:18 +0000 UTC

Hi!

Here's a quick dev update and rather tech-oriented this time.

Like mentioned earlier. I have started the bug fixing / tweaking phase for Public Demo 2 and there was (so far) 2 major difficult bugs and over +50 small "easy to fix" bugs when I started this phase.

Today I managed to fix one of those major bugs and here's a little explanation related to that.

So in Public Demo 2 there are can be really big height differences between player and the AI (like AI guarding in some high-ground spot). When these height differences occur this would naturally require AI looking down or up towards the player.

Animations are always made "flat-level" so there has to be dynamic spine bone calculations which override the animations, so the AI can actually aim towards player. This system involves lot of calculations, limiting and ridiculous amount of edge-cases and this was the issue here, since some situations totally broke these calculations.

I managed to this fix spine calculation issue today (this was that major bug) and AI can now do all kinds of height based aiming reliably and this is especially important in areas like stairs where player can be below or above the AI.

In terms of code amount, sometimes these solutions are rather simple but in reality the most time consuming part is to learn/research that simple approach.

This is for example the correct calculation for that spine bone and this took me around 8h to fully figure out correctly in Godot and probably +20 different "wrong iterations" at first :)

In the video attached to the post you can see how the spine bone is now calculated dynamically and this can blend with the animations and ragdolls, even though these are not active in this test clip.

More AI related things, I also activated the AI looting and picking up the AI weapon today, so those are available in Public Demo 2 now.

In terms of those "easy to fix" bugs, I think I have fixed around 15 of them so far.

- Antti (Developer)