A.I - A Formation Tale.
Well it's the time again, that time when I remember that I should be writing a blog post and when I remember that the human body needs sleep (3:25AM)
So what have I been doing? Well as you can hopefully see above, you can see I’ve been working on some A.I.
“But Nathan, it looks like you just got them to move forward.” Shut up mortal! I’ll have you know that they are able to do much more than “move forward”, they can do like, a couple other things as well.
So what I actually got the A.I to be able to do was.
Create positions to the left and right of a squad leader.
Follow that squad leader around while maintaining a formation.
Have the ability to support an infinite amount of A.I squad members.
Jump and crouch all by themselves.
So yeah, that’s like four things. There are a bunch more little things that I put into the A.I, mainly for the sake of having it designer friendly, so they are able to easily mess around with some options, like, Changing the distance between the A.I, settings the squad leader, setting if they should be on the left or right of the squad leader and being able to tell them not to join the formation.
It was interesting making this A.I, the blueprinting that I did for it was a lot different than what I had done in Reverie. All the code is contained inside of the actual A.I and a Squad blueprint. This makes things so much easier when it comes to editing it and using inside of a game. I would have normally done all the code inside of the level blueprint, mainly because I found doing that was the easiest way to gain access to the information stored in other blueprints. But this time, I used the knowledge gained from “Reverie” to do it better this time.
I made it designer friendly for the purpose of checking off A.I and making a tool from my KPI. But while I was doing that, I realised that I need to make everything designer friendly, it just makes much more sense than making it so only I can mess around with it. I didn’t actually realise that Unreal does the same thing as Unity in the way you are able to change values inside blueprints from the editor screen. So this makes my life easier on two fronts, the first being, I’m able to play around with values easier, and the second being, I won’t have the trouble of designers messing around with things they don’t understand.
Well I guess that is it for now, depending on if I can be bothered, Tomorrow I’ll post my final thoughts on the “Reverie” project, not as a post-mortem though, just as my ramblings.
Till next time, Nathan out!