The Team continued work on AI improvements this week, and we ran into an interesting bug during one of our play sessions. While running around testing out some of the new behaviors and tactics we’ve taught the mutants, we discovered one poor fractured soul who had the misfortune of spawning on top of a hut. While holding higher ground is usually a sound tactic in combat, this thing made the rookie mistake of leaving his feet unprotected through the ceiling inside. The spawning problem has been cleared up but you can see in this picture below just how vulnerable his piggy toes were.
We’re building a new threat system for both the natural and unnatural creatures in the game. We’ve added such considerations as damage dealt to an AI, and a target’s distance from an AI into the threat system. This allows creatures to make better decisions about who to rend and disembowel instead of charging and chewing on the first thing they see.
We adjusted the time it takes for a cannibal to be attracted to a corpse, and made some improvements to how a player burns a kill. Remember, if you don’t cremate the bodies of the fallen they will attract animals and cannibals. That sort of carelessness can come back to literally bite you on the ass and everywhere else too. We added new blood effects to the cannibal’s eating animation in the hopes of making the spectacle more gruesome and implemented proximity burning of corpses to make the process easier. There’s really no excuse now for not cleaning up your carnage in the game.
While the mutant on the roof turned out to be more humorous than harmful, not everything was hampered by mesh problems. Here’s a look at a player that wasn’t fast enough to get away from The Butcher, one of the newer members of Big Bob’s cannibal gang.
