In the last weeks we only did bug fixing. I thought that it wouldn't be easy to implement a new animation system and an editor for it but I didn't expected that it would be so hard. Because some other systems were incompatible we had to reimplement them.
New AI system
As the new animation system will (hopefully) allow us to create better monsters we also had to improve the artificial intelligence. So we completely rewrote the steering algorithms. This time they will not only be abled to deal with monsters on the ground. Instead we also added support for flying and swimming entities. The fish is already swimming:
The screenshot is blurred because it was taken under water. This is not a bug it is a feature of our new HDR renderer!
New sensor system
And as the new steering algorithms support obstacle avoidance we also had to improve our sense system. This allows a monster to perceive its environment. We hope that this will also allow us to support flocking.
New collision system
And to support monster with a more realistic physics we also added a new collision system. This can be controlled by our in-game editor.
Visual programming
To improve the development speed our in-game editor supports now visual programming. For this we implemented over 50 different types of modules. Math, physics, animations, steering, … it's all there. So the new stuff can be accessed and controlled directly in the game:
Here is how the animation system for the fish looks like in the visual programming editor:
In later versions this editor can also be used to create mods for the game!
Other stuff
And of course we added other small stuff like „Small Signs“. These can be used to label your chests for example.
So what is next:
I am currently fighting with the state machine which drives the animations. Then the fish AI needs to be tuned. Perhaps we will add further animations. And then we want the add new monsters like the sheep, the wolf and the bear.
And then we have to test the new boat and do some minor bug fixes with the fluent water (there are currently big air bubbles in the water).
So it seems that we have much to do. I am sorry that we couldn't upload a test version. We simply changed a lot of internals of the engine.
