Game Demo
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Goal driven behavior
in Game Demo AI ProgrammingThe work on the goal driven behavior for my bots has been an undergoing work during a long time of the project, mostly when I was tired of debugging. Last week of the project have only been dedicated to the behavior thou and even thou a lot of them were written there were non of them that didn’t need some kind of rewriting. At the moment there are only three “main” goals: Attack enemy, Grab flag, Score flag. There is a lot of different sub-goals thou to make the character path find, run, attack and die. Implemented a special goal Think which is the goal that decides what my agents should do. Every “main” goal got it’s own desire calculator which uses things lake range, agent health and flag position to calculate a number between zero and one and then sets the highest goal as the agents current goal. Balancing the desires was very hard and does need a lot more testing and balancing to get the desired behavior from the agents.
Finished!
in Game Demo Character ModelingMy Character from Anna Larsson on Vimeo.
And you can find the Making Of document here
Path smoothing
in Game Demo AI ProgrammingFallen behind on the blogging this last week so here comes a few things I have done.
Path smoothing so the characters won’t walk so strange. Red line is the original path found by my path finder. Blue line is my new smoothed path. Only had time to implement step one out of two so there is still room for improvements but the path is now acceptable at least.
The method I have implemented to smooth the path is called “rubber banding”. All my triangles is my nav-mesh is bound together with it’s adjacent triangles by three edges, one for each adjacent triangle. When finding my path I am using the mid-point of those edges as the points the character moves to. When “rubber banding” my path the idea is to move the walk-point on every edge to straighten out the path. Further explanation can be found in my HowTo.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
MS3 delivery!
in Game Demo Environment DesignThe milestone3 delivery is done! The demo can be downloaded here. The .exe is located in bin/win32. There are 3 versions with different resolutions. We might do some tweaking before the presentation next week. Other than that the group is now working on all the documentation for the project.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Tweaking animations
in Game Demo AnimationSince the last post I have mostly tweaked animations and such. All the animations are allmost done, some tweaking is still required. Im confident obout making the deadline.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
lighting
in Game Demo Environment DesignI have started lighting. I am using 8 lightmaps for the scene, 4 for the outside part, 2 for the inside, and 2 for the cave.
lightmap distribution
lighting progress
I have also made a new collision mesh. Fredrik was unhappy with the one I’d done earlier. Apperently there had to be a hole in the groundmesh where trees and stuff where placed or the characters would walk through them. I also started creating the “flags”, using Magnus designs.
flag progress
Friday, March 12, 2010
Almost there
in Game Demo Character Modeling
The character is more or less finished, maybe I should’ve made it more detailed, perhaps 6000 triangles is a bit low. We did aim to make the scene low-res though and that’s certainly accomplished 
Anyhow, I managed to fix most of the strange shadows in her face. Here’s some screenshoots from the Nebula Viewer.
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
Pathfinding
in Game Demo AI ProgrammingFixed my A* so it will now give me a short path. Seems to be some minor bugs in it, sometimes the path I get is kind of strange and not really the shortest but it will have to work for now.
Now I just need to smooth the path a little 
Not really pleased with the way my A* is implemented right now but fixing that will have to wait. Next thing to do is to test the goals I have implemented so far and then implement a few more goals. If that doesn’t take to long I will come back to the A* and fix it.
Pathfinding
in Game Demo AI ProgrammingThe good news is that I solved the problem with finding the triangle I’m standing inside, the bad news is that my A* isn’t working.
Start is the circle to the left in the image and goal is the circle to the right. The lines in pink is the “shortest” path my A* found. It goes far of the screen and in to dungeons and over hills in to the lake for a bath and then some more wandering around the map.
Monday, March 08, 2010
Progress
in Game Demo AI ProgrammingYay! I solved the problem with the Nav-mesh. The problem was when I calculated the midpoint of the sides of my triangles so it wasn’t a major problem but kind of hard to find. This is how it looks now:
After that was fixed I found another problem, this time it’s when I’m trying to find the triangle the character stands inside. Just like all my other problems it works some times an other times it doesn’t. I will have to fix this problem soon because I need it to work to test the rest of my program.
While ignoring that problem I have been working on the goal driven behavior for my agents. Agents should now be able to pick up the enemy flag and return it to their base to score as well as attack each other as soon as I fix the “find triangle problem”. At the moment I’m working on the priority system for the goals. So that the agents will appear “smart” and not just rush in to a group of five enemies.
The agents is also sending messages to each other to make the rest of the team more aware of the game situation. A few of the messages that can be sent if when the flag is taken and returned. Also got a few messages being sent between two fighting agents so they now when the opponent dodges of preforms an attack.
Working with Mathias to solve some problems with the mesh I’m using for the Nav-mesh but I think we got them all solved. The problem was when he made the mesh in parts, my Nav-mesh creation system didn’t find the path from one part to another even thou the character should be able to walk there. Also had a problem where the character could walk through some walls and trees because I didn’t detect them.
Sunday, March 07, 2010
animation progress
in Game Demo AnimationTheese are some of the animations I have done, some will still require some tweaking or speeding up.
http://gscept.com/projects/10/gAni/public/aniex01.mov
Not to many animations are left now, athough there is still tweaking left to be done.
Friday, March 05, 2010
week 7
in Game Demo Environment DesignI have now textured everything in my scene. I’m still not satisfied with everything, but i will have to start lighting now if I am to get done in time. If I’m fast at creating my lightmap UV sets I might take a day or two to add some small things or rework some textures.
Progress week 6
in Game Demo Character Modeling
This week I’ve been working on finishing my textures and making two sets of maps, since this’ll be a “capture the flag”- game with two teams it’s necessary to have two sets of textures. I’ve also made a more detailed version of the sword and applied it as a texture map, and put some color on it as well, no specular map for the sword yet though, I’ll fix that at the beginning of next week. I’ve some issues with some of the maps and I’ll deal with them in the coming week as well.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
more texturing
in Game Demo Environment DesignI have textured almost everything in the level now. Next week I will texture the last objects, redo some which i’m not satisfied with. I will add a couple of small objects, and I will hopefully be able to start preparing for lighting at the end of the week. Creating my uv spaces for the lightmaps etc.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Animation progress
in Game Demo Animation
The animations are coming along nicely. I have completed a few cycles(some tweaking is needed though), I have among others done a damage animation and dodge animation, and I’ve been experimenting with attack animations (Next week I will probably uppload a short movie instead of an image to display what I’ve done).