Hello and welcome to March's update.
This months work was pretty similar to last months, in that it was focussed almost entirely on the AI.
I'm pleased to report that AI are now fully persistent, traffic and NPC's will move about no matter where you are in the game world, this really helps contribute to a living and breathing virtual world. This was a lot of work however, and there's still some more work to do in this area in order to expand what the AI are capable of.
I have to label every single road and give it an ID, and using that ID, traffic can find out where they should turn at what junctions in order to reach their destination, this part of the process isn't overly hard, but it's very time-consuming, and involves endless copying and pasting of code, hundreds of lines.
Makeshift debug text I made to check traffic is working correctly.
Because of this system however, I can manually specify what the traffic should do at each junction, allowing me to give accurate directions to traffic, instead of it being left to a system which may be flawed in some situations.
If you remember the list of AI features I posted last month, you'll see that this ticks off the 1st stage of the AI, with the 2nd stage partially underway.
February's_Update wrote: 1. NPC's will be persistent, constantly moving in the background. (COMPLETED)
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. (UNDERWAY)
3. NPC names are randomly generated from a list of possible names, a personality is also selected for them. (UNDERWAY)
4. Personalities will affect various things, including slightly affecting their driving. (NOT STARTED)
Now for jobs... I've made the decision to remove them from the game, although I found the idea of doing minigames in order to earn money quite novel, they were also repetitive, and given that you would have to do it every in-game day, for goodness knows how many days before you could afford a business, I felt that it was best to start the player off higher up the ladder. You will now start with a small business of some sort, which will make it easier to earn money, and hopefully a bit more exciting than doing the same minigame over and over.
Now onto multiplayer, I've been a bit quiet on this subject lately, mainly because I haven't really started working on it. Although I showed some screenshots a while back, they were just prototypes, and I wasn't ready to start working on them properly. The game itself is more important to make first, the multiplayer will come later. But that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about it.
My idea for the multiplayer mode, would not be for some MMO-like experience, rather, I would prefer to make the game suited for 2 to 8 players. The host would specify a 'target goal', which would be the amount of assets a player would have before they win. Then it would be a race for all players involved to acquire wealth and get the amount of money required for victory!
Although the multiplayer would be designed with 2 to 8 players in mind, it's quite possible hosts will be given a fair amount of customization over their server, so the imposed limit may be higher.
The multiplayer would be similar to the single-player, however adjustments would have to be made to allow for things such as network bandwidth, AI might be simplified for example.
To end off I'll just show you a couple of houses you can buy, these 2 houses finish off the 3 houses available to purchase at the moment, including the first house that you start with, which has been shown in previous articles. Both of these are bungalows with 1 floor.
Remember to follow me on Twitter and Track This Game to be kept up to date with all the latest info, now I've got to get back to naming all these roads... -cries bitter tears-
"and involves endless copying and pasting of code, hundreds of lines" that's not a good thing to hear as a programmer. I would recommend making your functions a bit more generalized and modular. That's one of the most important rules to know. Instread of putting that much work into the AI you could have put more work into making future work easier.
Don't be fooled into thinking I didn't try a more dynamic system that handles itself, but ultimately it was more accurate and quicker to add the data manually instead of trying to make it handle itself, which wasn't working.
An A* algorithm would have been simpler to add for pathfinding, but it's also very resource intensive, it's doubtful that the Game Maker engine could handle something as complex as that on this scale.