My first dev blog
Good to have you here with me today!
Please be patient with me as I get used to this platform again. I’ve not used / been involved with web page admin for a very long time, so I hope I don’t screw things up too badly.
Thank you for visiting my blog. I aim to use these pages to go into more detail about any new screenshots or videos that I post. I do not know if these will become weekly updates or just whenever I have something interesting to share. Sometimes I do not like to share when things are going bad, or If I’m struggling with something – I don’t want the blog to become a place where I am venting about what errors took up all of my day.
I posted an update today via Twitter / Youtube. Check it out!
At the time of my post, I had this to say:
Testing a way to have NPC’s navigate through doors with the use of smart navigation links. He is only ‘kicking’ the door because this is the only animation I have, I will replace it with one that will appear to ‘push’ the door at a later time.
Well technically, he isn’t kicking a door down here. It’s just that I needed to plug in an animation just so that I had a visual representation that something on the AI was firing. Doors can be kicked open, but Jake is currently the only person in the game who can kick. Doors in Underhell receive damage from special melee attacks – and when this damage type is found – the doors fling open at a higher speed than they would do normally. What the AI is doing here is reaching a point in the navigation mesh where an obstacle blocks the path. They are taking an action here to open the door which is in the way and then continuing their navigation.
I am still ironing out some bugs with this. At the time I posted it, the AI first seems to run off to the side – as if he changed his mind about going in the door. This has been fixed now and I’m currently trying to figure out the best and easiest way to operate and manage this system for all doors in the game.
Someone asked if Hector would be able to just jump through the window instead, and yes it would be possible to do this as the navigation area can have a ‘cost’ and the AI will always look for the cheapest route to the target. Therefore, If I came up with a system for AI to vault through windows, this would become the cheapest route – if the door wasn’t open of course.
I don’t think I’ll get chance to build this functionality yet, but I’d love to enable the Infected to pour in through windows like this. An idea I have for it is to have the infected play an animation where they start to climb through the frame, and then stumble / ragdoll to the floor on the other side. This should really help sell their behaviour as frantic, screaming inmates come pouring into the room. We are probably a long way off from this though.
The game has some playable areas, however without NPCs it is a confusing and boring mess. So I hope you don’t mind waiting a little longer before the world is much more enjoyable to traverse. I do plan on releasing a playable demo, but with all eyes on the project (including the original creator of Underhell) it has to feel right.
Thanks for reading!
