Despite some of us still fighting off the lingering effects of a turkey coma, we got right back where we left off this week working on AI steering, tackling bugs, and polishing our player construction system. We made many tracking/pathing improvements to our heavy hitters. Steering for our mutant overlord Big Bob and the island’s many bears was implemented. We added “turn in place” animations when bears rotate to face their enemies but ran into a little problem. A bug popped up that would cause AI to turn in place when first aggroed. Even Bob would do a little pirouette like a gruesome Sugar Plum Fairy before charging off to devour something. As cute and festive as it was we took the spins out of their attack moves.
There were several other bugs addressed this week too. We fixed a bug where melee AI could attack enemies through thin objects such as doors. We found that wolves could potentially get stuck in “Hit and Run” mode, and fixed an issue where a player could stand/jump up when swimming in open water. We respect the grace and strength of dolphins as much as anyone, but we don’t want our players to swim like them.
While we were busy keeping players from launching themselves out of the surf, we made a few swimming/water improvements. We changed drowning damage to allow players a few more seconds of floundering and tweaked variables for swimming on the surface without drowning. We even implemented a new death icon so players have something nice to look at before they sink beneath the waves.
Finally, we continued to work through the construction system bug list adding a little polish as we go. As you can see from these shots below our thatch buildings are looking terrific.
