Skip to main content

NPC commands, map reveal and Inventory ideas

This week I did a whole bunch of work on commands, so the AI players can be better guided by the player. I've also added speech above the NPCs so they can respond to your commands and you can get additional info about what you're asking them to do.
For example if you ask them to walk, it says "Look out for secret doors and traps!" Which is what walking is for.

[You can also see the new doors]

Some other improvements:
If you push against an NPC (because of being stuck and wanting them to move out of the way) you will send a message to all the other NPCs to increase their distance from the player for a short time. This stops the situation where one NPC further down the line is blocking but is not too close to the player so doesn't know they need to move.

You can urge them to attack or follow you. This will set their follow distance and their engagement distance. You can also set this independently for each NPC.

You can ask them to wait behind. Again you can leave just one behind using AI behavior instead of commands.

You can tell them to hurry up, if they got lost. This will tell them to make a big effort with pathfinding (using more system resources for a time) so they can get back to you. Once they are back by your side they will go back to normal pathfinding.

Another area I've been working on is the map reveal.

[You can also see the new pits]
I'm using a ranged based algorithm which flood fills out from the player, stopping at closed doors. Monsters in an unexplored region of the map will usually be spawned in dormant state. If their tile becomes explored they will wake up.

If you open a door the interior of the room quickly becomes revealed and any monsters there will be alerted.

Some monsters will be awake even off screen and may come to join in if they hear combat.

Unexplored areas are very dark blue. You can kind of see the layout of unexplored rooms but not exactly. The image above has been lightened to help with seeing what's happening. Because my tiles are offset quads it's hard to have invisible areas right next to revealed areas. It looks strange. It's the biggest drawback I've found so far with the offset quad method.

The next area I'm working on, and this is something I keep putting off (notice how I'm writing a blog instead of doing it) is Inventory and items.

Here's a kind of mockup of what I'm planning:

[skeuomorphism]

I had planned to make multi tile items like in S.T.A.L.K.E.R, but that works best with mouse control. It's not so easy to navigate with just keyboard. SO all items are going to be single tile.

I've worked today on a shader to add a colored outline to items so they can be color coded. I can use that information to show weapon damage or item quality.

I think now I've settled on the single tile implementation it shouldn't be too hard to add items to the game. Anyway, I think I've explored every other possible area of working on the game and now I'm forced to get on with inventory management.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Upstairs / Downstairs.

I've decided to make my prefabs multilevel. Later this should allow me to add pit traps and other great stuff. It also makes it easier to line up stairs so that you can exit them on the same co-ordinates where you entered them. The prefab editor is pretty much finished, it just needs some code for loading up prefabs from a saved dictionary, so that they can be checked or edited. The entries will need to be forwards compatible, so I'll be loading each tile and then translating the indexes to a new array, that way if I add extra indexes or extra info (like traps or puzzles) I'll be able to update existing prefabs to work with the new standard. Click for a video.
6 comments
Read more

Automating Level imports from Blender to Godot

  Recently I've been making some levels in Blender an importing them into Godot. There are only about 7 or 8 shaders for each level, not counting dynamic objects which will be added later. But to improve rendering performance, it can be a good idea to split the meshes up into sections. At that point you might be faced with a list like this: Or it might be even more chaotic, if you didn't use simple names for the objects in your level. So it can take a long time to sort out all the meshes, make them unique and add textures and so on. Blender imports with simple Blender textures, or with placeholder materials. This is sometimes OK, but if your Godot shaders are very different to those used by Blender, it means applying new materials to every mesh object in the level when you import the scene. I found that during the design process, I was importing and readying a level several times before I was happy with the final layout. So at first I was wasting a lot of time. In Blender, I us
3 comments
Read more

Advice needed on tilesets...

I need some advice on which is the best way to handle building the dungeon. Right now I'm using prefabs for my dungeon, they have a north south east and west section for each "room": The basic tileset. This has several advantages, and also several disadvantages. Firstly I can have curved rooms, I can have tunnels and other interesting shapes. The tilesets can look quite nice with a little work. On the other hand I can't easily get the navigation data before building the map and once the map has been built I can't make changes to the layout, like having active pit traps or believable secret doors. Although the rooms are interesting, they are quite repetitive, and it takes a lot of effort to make even a few different variations. Also rooms are constrained to one size. A newer version of the tileset with a lot of variant parts for making more interesting rooms. To create a tile set is a real headache too. Planning how to lay out the UVs, trying to cra
7 comments
Read more