More bots
The world of Far Seed is inhabited not only by enemy bots(as in laser defence level), but also by friendly ones. They can protect you, collect resources, construct and repair - do anything you would program them for. All friendly bots navigate automatically, so the player does not have to bother about basic pathfinding and obstacle avoidance.
New resource mining location
Location is rich in mineral resources, but first you (actually, your bots) need to find them, extract, and transport to the base. Designing level turned to be a bit hard task as I do not have 3d assets made in unified style. It took me a whole week of experimenting with different surface textures and models to conclude that simple low poly style will be sufficient at this stage of game development.
New location means new tasks and bot activities that, in turn, require new visual development mechanisms and instruments. Below are the major ones.
Access to variable fields
Now you can manipulate not only with variables but also with variables saved in other variables. For instance, upon scanning soil scanner returns a 'Soil_Data' that contains data (float or single values) about water rate, metal rate, etc. Just click on the output socket that returns Soil_Data result, select required variable and now you have a node that outputs a value of this variable.
Visual element menu
Element menu , like the one you can see near the socket, extends the possibilities of visual script development in WAKA editor. For instance, now you can create relevant variable node right from socket menu without entering main construction board and looking for node of the required variable type.
Arrays and “for loop”
WAKA editor now can iterate through array's elements. Hope to show soon how mining bot selects mining site with the richest metal rate in the soil.
Future plans
Currently, I’m designing several new features:
- visual functions - set of visual nodes that can be called, receive arguments. and return results, similar to conventional functions in programming languages. Despite current game tasks can be solved without visual functions I believe that at mid-high levels of the game players will be able to understand the idea of function and appreciate the possibility of visual code reusability.
- console - console screen helps to debug visual scripts as well as broads the interaction between player and programmable bots or equipment. For instance “scan_bot1.Scan_Point(3, 78, 1);” command will call previously developed visual function responsible for moving to the point and scanning soil there.
