Its been a few weeks since I posted an update. Work has been taking a toll on my dev time more than I'd like.
In more positive news, the project I talked about for creating procedural characters as a research project got through phase one of a three phase "competition" for part-funding by the UK's "Technology Strategy Board". These guys do small amounts of funding for industry oriented R&D projects. The outcome of which I now have to submit a business plan and proposal which is stage two. Final stage is a dragons den type panel session.
I'll let you know if that goes ahead, because it could mean quite a big difference for both the game and for other indies in general.
Anyway, enough of that, what about the game itself? Well, I've been going through and polishing some of the existing features. Making them more robust and less hacked together before I move on with the next set of features. Its amazing how fiddly making a working crafting UI can be :)
Here's a video of the current dev build:
Next up is some more fixing of editor code before I crack on with the AI implementation. My plan is to have some characters doing simple daily tasks within the next month. With a bit more complex tasks taking longer (I'll have to build the activity items before the AI can handle them). The AI is going to be tricky because the world is entirely dynamic and currently there aren't any good solutions for entirely dynamic pathfinding that handles additive-generated worlds. I'm going to have to think of a good way to tackle that going forward.
Looking forward to breathing a bit of life into proceedings!
Phil.
