Today I mostly built new areas for the random missions, so the player sees some different stuff… It’s not highly complex, but it’s some polish…
In the process, I found a silly bug…
Basically, the enemies (in this case, the mechanoids) were going through the wall on this “custom map”… First, I saw that the navigation mesh was overlapping the wall (which is weird, considering how it’s built)… After a bit, I found out that the issue was that the wall wasn’t touching the ground, so there was a small gap between the wall and the ground, and the navmesh was being built there!
This would have been removed automatically, if I didn’t have an optimization stopping it, because this case shouldn’t happen!
Looking further into the issue, I finally found that it was the “terrain corrector” algorithm…
Basically, I have an algorithm that goes through the terrain and check if all areas of it are accessible… If he finds an area that’s big enough, he makes it accessible, by raising/lowering it, creating “stairs” between traversable and the area, etc…
So this algorithm was triggering after the map was put in place, so the algorithm would lower the terrain below the map (because the map is not part of this process, it’s visually added later), but the positioning of the map wouldn’t change… that would cause the crack and the problems…
This one was tricky to figure out! 
Now listening to “Under The Same Sky” by “Sleeping Pulse”
Finished “infestation” mission logic, it works great!
It’s just become more and more clear that the AIs need to be completely overhauled… The robots, for example, have too many ways to get “stuck”…
I’ll probably unify all the AIs into a single parameterized one… I’m pretty sure the problem with the robot AI is stuff I’ve solved in the hitman or pirate AIs…
Also made a new area (by coincidence, this time it also spawned on a dark planet)… But it’s fun, looking at the dark planets with bases, etc, and imagining this with decent shadows, I can see loads of fun to be had, besides looking very atmospheric…
Kind of reminds be of a very old game design of mine, “Into The Dark”…
This was the state of Spellbook back in 2004 or so:
Ah, nostalgia! 
Now listening to “Inside” by “Sarcastic”
Link of the Day: Another laugh…
I created a new area for the infestation missions, and hit some balancing issues… a lot of them, to be honest!
The solution ended up being simple, basically the beam cannon was way underpowered, but figuring out what was wrong was not easy…
What happens in this “intuitive balancing” I’m using is that you get an expectation (for example, this area has a difficulty of about 1.2, where 1 is starting difficulty, and 4 is the last areas of the game, so it should be fairly easy), and I have a good weapon (beam cannon, level 3) and good protection (shield, level 1), so this should have been a breeze, but it was just the other way around… I couldn’t get by it…
First I thought it was the health pools, or the shields of the enemies, but I finally decided to use a level 3 machine gun instead of the beam cannon, and that fulfilled my expectations: an easy enough fight!
I should probably do some more “scientific balancing”, which is when I use the formulas for the weapons and check them for their relative damage per second, overheat time, etc, etc, but that’s very boring and some of it is tricky to give a good math basis: for example, the shotgun’s dispersion make it very complex to evaluate exactly what is it’s damage.
Anyway, I still need to finish about 10 areas for this type of mission (other types are also using these areas), and the “Clear” type of mission, besides balancing this up correctly… The spawn numbers, for example, need to be crunched down (these mechanoids spawn in groups of 4, for example, while the corporate forces spawn one at a time, from each spawn point).
Now listening to “The Path of Totality” by “Korn”
Link of the Day: This game looks beautiful and it seems to be going for something different in terms of gameplay and “feel”… Will definitely check this one out!
Halfway through the infestation code.
There’s two variations of the infestation mission (and none of them are actually infestations): defend and clear.
On defend, waves of enemies spawn and the player must survive and kill them all. In clear, everything is already spawned, and the player just has to clear it up.
Currently I’m working on “defend”, but the specific code is pretty simple, just the spawning system is giving me some issues, since the enemies don’t do anything after spawning, which is weird…
Tomorrow I’ll take a look at it…
Now listening to “Veridia EP” by “Veridia”
Link of the Day: My great friend Luis Fazendeiro (from the great Painted Black) has a side project called “Sleeping Pulse” with the talented Mick Moss (from the also great Antimatter), and their debut album comes out on the 31st, and they just released the first official video for it… Check it out, it’s amazing!
Today I finished the code for the text of the infestation mission… It’s not as varied as I’d like but it’s complicated (in this context) to write generic enough text that can take any type of customer, enemy, etc…
I’d probably be better if I’d made some sort of L-system to create the text, maybe even use it to create “chains” of missions, but I’ll leave that for the sequel… 
Now listening to “Pain” by “Pain”
Link of the Day: Today we have a funny video from College Humor… I laughed very hard at this:
Today I wasn’t very motivated, an overall lack of energy… So I started by doing some writing, but the inspiration wasn’t great… Then I moved towards some research (mainly decals, ended up on this link which is probably the approach I’ll follow, although I’m not using deferred rendering on this game: goo.gl/S8o2W2)…
Finally, decided to start building the areas needed for the infestation missions:
It’s a simple “map”, to be inserted in the middle of a planet… I got to build additionally 4 to 6 of these, to have some variety (and hopefully force different tactics)…
Hopefully, tomorrow I’ll be more motivated and I’ll start with the text of the mission…
Now listening to “The Path of Totality” by “Korn”
Link of the Day: Some research stuff is really impressive… Hair is a big mystery for me, in visual terms… Too many variables (animation, display, etc), the math is complex, and it requires carefully authoring… So seeing something like this is like seeing magic:
SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 Posters from Gene Lin on Vimeo.
Just finished the infiltration mission… It’s a bit more fun that I was expecting, which I guess it’s a rather good thing…
Unfortunately, I’ve found a lot more bugs in the process… For example, on the screenshot above you can see props that should be on the wall in the middle on the room, for example. And this is not one of the worst examples, the game is full of these, let alone the bugs with the AI.
I’m pretty sure now that I have to rebuild all the AIs… Not the underlying system, that works well enough, but the way the system does the actual reasoning: when to run, when to attack, from where to move, etc.
Now listening to “Age of the Joker” by “Edguy”
Link of the Day: I like looking at graph tech papers and wish I’d like to have time to do that! This grass rendering presentation looks very cool: http://blog.codemasters.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Rendering-Fields-of-Grass-using-DirectX11-in-GRID-Autosport.pdf
Well, for some time now things were going slowly but according to plan… No, not anymore!
Too bad I didn’t take a screenshot of the before, but the pirate lairs were a mess… The laser beams were in the wrong position, the ceilings weren’t displaying, the props were all over the place…
Just some small changes in the codebase triggered a whole lot of problems, but now they’re mostly solved…
Only big bug still present in the pirate lairs are the collision boxes of the props, which for some reason stop the weapons, but not my character…
Anyway, with this in place I can do the really hard part: forcing a prop in the area to guarantee that the player has something to fetch at the end…
Now listening to “Paradise In Flames” by “Axxis”
Link of the Day: From some people that worked on the Bioshock games, here’s a new kickstarter for you to take a look: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/theblackglove/the-black-glove. You can recognize a lot of elements from Bioshock, but there are some weird (cool) stuff there as well!
Started work on the infiltration missions. In this type of mission, the player will be given a pirate lair and will have to infiltrate it, keeping casualties to a minimum. Every casualty will lessen the reward, until it basically only pays for the travel.
I mostly worked on the text part of the mission. It takes a long time to get some variety and coherence in the texts (although they aren’t that varied!).
Now listening to “The Nexus” by Amaranthe
Link of the Day: Web-technology has been really getting better and better in the last couple of years, that’s why services like Mimvi Tech Services Tech Industry are so useful now a days.… Looking at the samples at http://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_animation_cloth, I almost feel like picking it up to develop something with it!
The title says it all!
This screenshot is from the “dynamic” scan: player has to follow that thing around for as long as the scan takes, or else it will fail…
I think I’m going to work on the infiltration missions next!
Now listening to “Holy Land” by “Angra”
Link of the Day: I don’t have much interest in the game itself, but the visuals of this kickstarter game are absolutely amazing… Here is the demonstration that you don’t need ultra-shaders, PBR and fancy tech to build good graphics, as long as you got a good art direction (well, shaders help, of course!): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2074789246/innerspace
