TAR March-April Dev Update news - The Arcane Relics™

Greetings this May. Here's some progress-

Jon has spent some time on AI, thus:

• We are now using a different AI system than GOAP. GOAP planning was taking up too much CPU, and was getting too difficult to debug… Jon's been reading Mat Buckland’s book, Programming Game AI by Example, & have found his Goal-Driven system to be quite insightful. He has the new system up and running and it’s using a lot less CPU than the previous system!
• Continuing in the book, he decided to work on a weapon selection system for NPCs utilizing the chapter on fuzzy numbers. The basic idea is that they’ll choose the most desired weapon they have based upon various inputs, such as distance (Swapping from a bow to sword, for example). It’s coming along.

Now, putting aside the Castle "temporarily," I have begun work on a Lava cave! There’s a method to this madness I assure you. Here’s a peek:

This is a new area, and will not be replacing the Water Cave.

Jon has started the possibility of hitting multiple targets with one swing. We have wanted to have Strength, along with larger weapons, to allow for sweeping through multiple opponents, or at least smaller ones like bats, with one swing for a while. This is a step towards that. In the process, he may have fixed the bug where weapons could remain active if an attack animation was interrupted as well.

Jon's also dabbled in potions, continuing work to make them more modular. Previously, we would have to make 3 new prefabs for each potion type we would want to add. This was taking too long… Now, we only need to make one prefab per type. We've since added some new potion types including a Sleep Potion.

Also, he has been experimenting with coloring the potions programmatically based on their elemental compositions.

If you're still awake, this will put you to sleep:

Previously, setting up any random selections, such as items in containers, has used a pretty simple setup. We wanted to expand its capabilities and have more control over what could be done. There were things such as nesting loot tables or modifying a loot table result (varying gold and bolt amounts) which weren’t possible. We also wanted to utilize random seeds so, for example, the same loot/enemy rolls could appear, if desired (good for testing). It’s coming along.

It is nice to see more than a few pieces of gold appear in a container, that’s for sure.

Another semi-related task has been shifting various data into external XML files, using a more data-driven design. The new item loot tables utilize this setup.

This is a noticeable step towards being able to customize various aspects of the game. This can also help reduce our build times, as certain tweaks can be made externally without having to rebuild in Unity. This is a slow but beneficial process.

A couple more things before farewell. We wanted to share some useful Unity discoveries we’ve made during these past couple of months, for other devs out there:

• Alt/Option clicking an arrow next to a folder will open/close the folder along with all of its nested child folders! This has saved us a lot of time navigating our massive project.
• Discovered a very useful editor tool on the Unity forums that can find dependencies of scripts in your project, missing script references on prefabs, and more! Forum.unity.com

We have updated the project to v2018 of Unity. We have, and are, spending time to resolve issues that have appeared in the new version, but are excited about some of the new features! Overall, the transition has been smoother than previous version updates.

Lastly, we have been working on a side-project as well. Needless to say, it has taken some time away from TAR, but is nearly finished. It has certainly taught us some things and has helped us with clarifying some design decisions for TAR. We will reveal it, once it’s ready!

Ciao!