Welcome to another months update for IRL!
Let's jump straight in and talk about the games AI.
During the month of February and March, I realized that the game world felt a little lifeless, so I've made it my focus over the past couple of weeks to work on the games AI. My aims for the AI were originally much lower than they are now. I'll run you through what the plans for the AI are.
1. NPC's will be persistent, constantly moving in the background.
2. Each NPC will have their own house, which they'll travel to and from using their car. Unless the destination is close, then they'll walk.
3. NPC names are randomly generated from a list of possible names, a personality is also selected for them.
4. Personalities will affect various things, including slightly affecting their driving.
Some of these features are already in place, and it's already making a difference to how the game feels, this is still very work in progress, a video showing an AI driving a car is shown later in this article.
Shadows have been added to the game, which also aids the games overall feel. A lot of work went into these shadows to make sure they were accurate to the suns location and also so that performance didn't take a large hit. There's still 1 or 2 bugs to work out, but for the most part, they're working great. Also the time of day transition was made much smoother, instead of lighting being based on the hour, they are now based on the minute, thus being approximately 60x more accurate!
Finally, I added some changeability to the games businesses. At the end of a day, there is a chance that market popularity for that specific product will decrease or increase (Or possibly stay the same). This created a new problem, how can we keep track of the latest events? I previously added a News Ticker (Mentioned in the December update), but that was only useful for delivering quick, urgent information. So I added a news button, which contains a list of all recent events that have happened.
And here's the video I mentioned earlier, which shows off some NPC driving, as well as the new day/night transition and shadows.
Remember, if you want to keep up to date on things, follow me on Twitter, and Track This Game on IndieDB.
This gonna be really cool :D
Thanks, I hope so. :)