January 2nd, 2009
The rest of the team got a Christmas surprise, when two of our coders, Angua and Greebo (they rock!), dropped a completed mission on the rest of us. They both spent a week working on it in secret, to see what kind of mission could be finished in that time, and to see how close we are to being complete. Although it was a short mission (a bit larger than Thief's Den) it was great fun to play and shows that we are not too far away from being able to release the tools to the community. In terms of progress, Angua has been working on the AI, adding sitting behaviour. AI can be set as "sitting" at the start of the map, or you can use pathnodes to tell a patrolling AI to sit down somewhere, either for a set or random period of time. The AI can perform other animations (like warming hands) while sitting. You can even leave the AI sitting indefinitely if you like, though they will get up when startled or attacked. With the ability to have random pathnodes, that means you can have a patrolling guard who will, occasionally, sit down beside a fire to rest for a few seconds.
Ishtvan has been continuing to work on combat--players can now parry with the sword, either using a system like Mount and Blade (you choose the direction of the parry and it has to match the direction of the AI attack to work) or an easier auto-parry system (you hit 'parry' and the computer automatically matches the correct direction).
Nice, post a media update for the new mission!
Looking forward to it and nice to know you're still there.
Good work guys. Love what you are doing!