Monday, February 25, 2008
Sort-of-weekly Progress Update
This entry has been delayed a couple of days. This is due to some technical problems we had with the blog last friday.
The past week we have worked mostly on fixing problems and bugs. While we found and took care of a lot there are still a few known bugs left. We are working on getting them all out of our system.
Some things that were fixed are that the Overmind’s priority of things is actually now carried down the line all the way to the end reciever and not lost along the way. This has solved some of the erratic behaviour our workers had at times and they are now (to us) more predictable in what they’re doing.
We also did some work on the pathfinding algorithm to improve our units ability to move around in a more appropriate fashion. This includes walking to the actual closest bridge they see when they need to get over water even when they don’t see the full map. Also they now handle walking over hills better, only doing it when needed.
Furthermore we improved on the Overmind’s ability to move units around to explore the world by adding another method of exploring that is more direct. This improves the AI’s ability to do searches for resources that it is lacking.
During the week we tried some different rendering methods for water and decided against the reflective/refractive method since triple-pass rendering wasn’t really worth it for the effect it gave. We are now working on a different method that should be more resource-effective.
Terrain textures have been improved a bit by a graphics artist and as such the terrain now looks better than it did before.