This week the team made numerous AI improvements, worked on the siege system, and added many performance bot updates. We made some adjustments to the AI’s FOV and aggro distance to make sure the horrors of the jungle are properly stirred to action by player activities. We added sound types that will allow AI to only react to certain kinds of noises like gunshots, footsteps, or nearby alerts so our mutants aren’t running through the jungle every time a bird calls or the waves crash. We also fixed a bug involving ranged AI running amok when they couldn’t project an enemy’s location.
With all those improvements in the bag, we continued updating the siege system so our mutants will work better together while trying to overrun a base. We created a Siege Manager that supports defining the waves of AI that will attack the base during a siege. It generates 4 spawn points in a random rotation around the base, broadcasts an event each time an AI is spawned and defines a random chance for a siege to occur every X minutes. We tweaked how the manager determines the size of a base to include things like the number of walls, floors, and other construction pieces rather than just the base’s square footage, making sure that we generate the bloodthirsty horde that’s right for you!
Our testing bots got some attention too. We implemented the attacking of mutants, deer, bear, and wolves, harvesting trees, throwing torches, and shooting guns. The team added tracking of the pawn bots logging in/out, items they added to the world (thrown, dropped, and fired arrows), kills and deaths as well as console commands for stat reports. In their frenzy of throwing torches in the air and shooting anything that moves we found a bug where the bots were just throwing their axes at a tree presumably to harvest wood faster. We explained the importance of axe safety in the apocalypse and fixed the issue.
Lastly, polish on the diorama system continues offering players plenty of things to investigate, loot, or take shelter behind as they explore the world. Here’s a few shots of the latest iteration.
