Ash87

Preamble

Hello all, hope all is well as you read this. Today's update wont be as convoluted as the last few. As You've probably begun to find out from my stuff, I typically will run a few conflicting posts on single problems while I find a solution, followed by one blog that sums up said solution. I'm kind of hoping this is the sum-up post. I've been kind of bogged down in this AI mess, which makes sense, I mean people commit their whole career to working on AI afterall. The larger part of today's update will actually be the upcoming section, where I'm going to reveal some lore stuff to you, that I've been alluding to in older blogs, and finally explain it's relevancy.

Update

Well to begin, random movement is out. There is just no way I can make a random movement system, at my current level of expertise, that will do what I want it to do with the main monsters. I've already lost a week on this, probably best not to loose another. The solution, is to make custom paths and program the monsters to follow those paths. It was pointed out to me by a couple readers, that custom paths would allow for tighter control of my monsters, when it came to setting up encounters. Further, there is always the option to make multiple paths and set up something by which the monster will choose a path to take at random, after completing one path. This will prevent the player from just memorizing the monster patrol routes.

Sight detection has been fixed too. The sight cone has long since been a problem, because I had a few little variables that I couldn't quite fit together right. Basically I had all the puzzle pieces, but I wasn't putting them in the correct places. After a bit of research I finally found an example of somebody doing something similar to what I am trying to do, and was able to see the mistakes I had made. How it works is that the monster will be looking for the player to be in a certain range, between 2 lines, based on the angle between the monster and the player, and the distance from the monster to the player. The way I was setting up my if-then statements, because of some little quirk in Gamemaker, wasn't looking at the angles as being part of a 360 degree circle, but rather as whole numbers. To those who don't follow: Looking at the degree measures as whole numbers, means that if I say: if X < 15 degrees and Y > 345 detect, then gamemaker will be looking for a number that is both Higher than 345, and lower than 15. In a perfect world, the degree measures would be a 360 degree circle, and not count values outside of 360 (Since any value above 360, would just have 360 subtracted from it to make the value above 0 degrees). This is one of those, "That makes sense in retrospect" things, but I've got the solution now and it should be going in tonight.

Upcoming

So with the completion of monster detection, I have something that I'm going to need to look into next. So each monster in this game, is meant to be a huge deal. Well, scratch that. There will be Rats... which are kind of... well, rats (They actually, may revitalize the whole, random monster wandering script at some point). But the real monsters, are something else entirely. Here is the basic idea I've been working from:

The source material is the Case of Charles Dexter Ward. In that book, the narrator enters a space beneath the house of the eponymous title character. Therein, he finds that somebody (I wont spoil the twist ending of a 100 year old Novella, that is well worth the read) is conducting necromancy in that dungeon-esque place. The means by which this person is resurrecting people, is that he creates "Salts" of the person. These salts can then be chanted at, at which point the person resurrects. The problem, is that sometimes when reducing somebody to a salt, the dead body the salt is produced from, will not be complete due to decomposition or biological forces. This leads to some "Imperfect salts" which are twisted, deformed monstrosities that the dungeon's master keeps in a pit.

So my working title for the game as of now is: Imperfect Salts. The monsters you'll deal with, that detect and hunt you are... you guessed it, the aforementioned Imperfect Salts. NOW, why did I tell you all of this? My plan right this moment, is to make each monster unique. The whole, custom made paths is part of what pushed me down this line of thinking again (I had originally, kind of planned to do this, but was never sure if I would or not). practically speaking, this means that each monster can have, half a dozen paths assigned to them, and even have a fixed routine... which would be a really cool way of doing this, in my opinion. Further, the imperfect salts are in all kinds of a mixed up state. One thing I've figured, was that they would be kind of going through the motions of their old lives, in the dungeon. I could probably bring this across better by setting up their paths and routines by hand. Even if it'll mean more work, I figure the result of a hand crafted dungeon with that level of detail would be more appreciated by players. There may be exceptions to this by the way. I've considered there being some monsters that aren't Imperfect salts, because they are Perfect salts (There is again, a precedent for this in the source material, but I'm not going to bog you down with another paragraph explaining it... unless you want me to, at which point, ask me below). These guys I'll probably give walking paths that are changed based on other larger events in the dungeon, over multiple levels of the dungeon (Of which, at this moment, I'm projecting that there will be 3-5 dungeon levels).

Anyway, thanks as always for reading!