Sunday, March 16, 2008
Milestone 3 Presentation.
Here’s the milestone 3 presentation:
MS3.ppt
And here’s a Demo of the Game:
Demo.rar
The knight currently lacks his left & right sprites.
Edited: I’ve detected a quite large memory leak in the game caused by reloading the textures every time the map starts, witch means that for every time a match begin the game will have a slight fps drop. I’ll try to remove this memory leak today.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Weapon System Completed!
I’ve now completed the last of the game’s weapon system, so now all the weapons seems to work as intended.
Though I think I’ll need to adjust the wizard’s frost bolt slowing effect a bit as it is currently impossible to get away from the attacker when hit cause the slowing effect halves the target’s current speed every time it hit.
I still have to implement the AI version of the Curse effect and I’ll need to reset the fire cool down timer between each map, but after that I’ve only got the basic sprites left to do in order to reach the minimum requirements. Once I’ve reached the requirements I’ll change a few settings to get a nice Demo where the player will be able to choose one of the three classes and play on a series of maps.
Here’s a screenshot where the player have used the force ability to throw an obstacle.
(The thrown obstacle is the box right above the caster).
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Flee State Discarded & Small AI Optimizing/Bug Fix!
Well, after trying out the result of the flee state I noticed that once the AI agents attempts to flee they are always killed almost instantly as the maps really are far too small to have any “safe” locations. Now that I’ve removed the flee state however they seem to survive slightly longer.
I’ve also optimized the AI a little to make the game more fun and I’ve finally found and fixed two AI bugs where, one where they ran into a wall an wasted all energy by attacking it and one where they kept walking back and forth on the same spot for about 1 - 3 sec every once in a while. There is however one additional bug witch I still haven’t solved, this bug is very rare (witch makes it harder to locate) but it may crash the game on occasions, it seems that this bug only appear sometimes when the player is standing in the top left corner of the map and one or more of the AI agents are targeting him.
Now I’ve just got the last 3 weapon effects, the AI version of the curse effect and the remaining basic sprites left to do in order to reach the minimum requirements.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Fine Tuned AI.
I found a few mistakes where all the AI agents where sharing the same timers witch resulted in odd behavior for all except the first AI agent. They still need a little fine tuning to make them look “intelligent” and not just like some maniacs running around shooting at everything as they do now. I’ve given the ability to select target to the AI agents so that they don’t go all against the player so now they attack each others as well, in general they behave as they should, but they do have a tendency to face a wall attack attack it a little now and then.
I’ve done most of the flee state now as well, so they will soon be able to flee, but as it is now they would flee until they die if they are low on life points so I’m considering to add a life regeneration of about 1 life point per 10 seconds or something like that witch would reward those who survive long enough with low amount of life points. To ensure that they won’t flee as soon as their life points fall below a certain value I think I’ll add a chance that they will ignore the damage and continue to attack until they die.
Here’s two screenshots of “Wizard vs. Wizard vs. Wizard vs. Wizard” battles. :)
Monday, March 10, 2008
Frame Rate & Crashes Fixed!
Well, the huge drop of the frame rate seems to be caused by using more than one thread since the frame rate went back to 60 fps once I moved all calculations to the main thread and removed the AI thread. So now the game runs at rather nice again. By removing the AI thread I also removed the remaining bugs as they only occur when the threads where writing and reading certain variables at the same time. There is however another bug I’ve noticed witch causes random projectiles to spawn and move at random locations, this new bug only occur when there is more than one AI agent activated and one or more of them have died, so I guess that they aren’t stopped correctly, but at least this bug doesn’t crash the game. :)
Due to the result of this fix I can now activate all available AI opponents without risking to reach a frame rate below 10. But I’ll need to adjust their behavior so that they’ll actually do what they are supposed to do and to allow them to target each other instead of locking their choice of target to the player (to avoid unfair 3 vs 1 fights).
Here’s a picture of a 3 wizards vs 1 wizard screenshot:
(Green, Purple & Orange vs Blue(Player))
Once I’ve finished the last two ranger sprites & the 4 knight sprites I’ll be able to take screenshots of more variating battles where the other’s ain’t represented by white squares.
I’ve also changed some timers to avoid unnecessary updates of AI / Player to ensure that the frame rate stays at 60 fps (witch is the highest fps allowed as I’ve caped it there).
As the bugs and frame rate issues are fixed, I can now continue with the game.
I’m closing in on the minimum requirements specified in the design document but as I’ve already added a little more than what I first chose as minimum requirements (more than one class etc) I’ve now set a slightly higher minimum requirement for the game.
Thing’s left for the new minimum requirement:
- AI:
- AI Flee State
- AI version of the Curse effect
- Include Traps, Snares & Players for the AI map (I might skip traps & snares for the AI map though)
Game Play: - Weapon effects for the three last weapons (Force, Throw Object & Trap Object)
Graphics: - Last two basic Ranger character sprites
- The four basic Knight character sprites
- The four basic Knight weapon sprites
I won’t be able to add sound, more advanced AI and other wanted extra features before the MS 3 delivery due to lack of time, but I’ll try to add as much of them as possible after MS 3.
