Blogs

After my previous attempt at getting bad guys to move around, I hit YouTube hard in my lunch breaks and discovered that lots of people repurpose the inbuilt animator finite state machine for doing most AI.

SMELLY

This is a code smell. Every domain object and class should do one job and do it well. Repurposing suggests that you're bending a system for something that it wasn't intended for (single responsibility principle). However, I thought it was best to just get over myself, give it a go and then come back again later.

The next step in Cloudship is adding bad guys that will follow eventually hunt and kill the player. I know that I'm going to create a finite state machine eventually where the enemy will sit at various states and move from one to the next given certain times. The machine will be made up of rules like this ([name] rule):

I'm charging toward the more difficult things first and creating a procedurally generated weather map was definitely a big task. I wanted to use a Perlin noise map rather than circle packing algorithms because I wanted there to be dead spaces where you can stop, recoup and not drift off. I might stick in a global wind to gently push you.

Preamble

I'm holidaying at home this week; spending lots of time with Kate and Naomi (Felix is in Folkestone with his Grandparents). There are snatches of downtime (like now) where Naomi is off to sleep, it's a bit early for lunch and Kate is pinned down. There's not enough time to get out to a field to fly the quads but there is enough time to bimble on the computer.

Ever since I saw the first trailers of lone echo I was facinated by it's unique locomotion techinique great graphics and interesting human and an AI robot in space story. Made by "Ready at Dawn" who made some of the best PSP games like Daxter and the god of war psp games (also The Order 1886 which looked amazing but was very very boring to play) Lone Echo and it's multiplayer component Echo Arena looked like they were going to be the first big professional vr game.

My co-worker is off sick (how sick? He's in bed with his sister! HAW HAW) so I threw caution to the wind and set about dismantling the somewhat sad Glass Mountain. Two farm towers (melon and pumpkin) are thrust up through it and as it is dwarfed by all around it and since I tidied up that area, it's looks somewhat sad.

Astroneer last night was fun but hitting crash bugs over and over was so very annoying. Big R understandably "fatigue-quitted" over them. We decided to do less land-training and more deep-cave diving for research, and we found it was stable. We got battery research, EMW managed to make a Moon base using the ship as a starting point and I became a ferry pilot to move resources from Terran to the Moon. I got a crash report now and again but it was certainly more fun. [Big R - I found the land train and your stuff and returned it safely to base].

Still in early access but supposedly pretty solid and from Epic mega games who sort of know how to make multiplayer games

A 4 player coop game of two halves part one in the day you scavenge materials and build a fort make weapons and traps then part 2 night comes and you repel a horde style attack filled with monsters.

It has four different classes that have different play styles

so minecraft crossed with L4D running in unreal 4 and featuring overwatch style loot boxes

So a while back a company called Glowforge offered basically a laser cutter for $2k which at the time was less than half the price of the cheapest laser cutters available to the hobbyist it also had some really nice features

Was playing this interesting pre pre pre alpha game off of itch.io called Autonauts.

It was described as Factorio meets Minecraft. Two games I really enjoy but the description was misleading. It could be better described as Factorio with vaguely 3d graphics and a pseudo voxel/minecraft art style.

Factorio is all 2d and sprite graphics the game play in all in the 2d plane. Autonauts has 3d graphics but the gameplay is still just 2d.