Thanks
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Little update...
Been working mainly on the AI, which is getting plain scary now
- I found a silly bug that prevented the enemies from shooting when stationary. Basically they travel between waypoints until they reach a good spot and then they scout around for you. If they spot you then you become their target. So I have it set to shoot while running towards you but at a reduced rate and when they get close enough they stop and aim - they weren't shooting when doing this before so there wasn't that much gunfire comming from the enemies - fixed it now though, and those guys are pretty lethal
. Blind luck on my part, but the enemy shooting code works with actual limb locations, so bullets are fired from the guns very accurately. This means that the enemies movement has a great affect on his accuracy automatically. It works too - they aim at you as best they can depending on where the gun is pointed, they kinda adjust themselves. When they're running, it's difficult for them to aim their weapon, so you get bullets flying past as much as hitting you, but that makes sense to me, I doubt I'll improve their aim, there's no point. It's quite cool to see a handgun enemy lock onto you at close range, just the animations mixed with extreme aiming conditions make them look very flamboyant, like pivoting around and swinging their aim like some Matrix dude.
I've smoothed out the animations too, well to an acceptable level, they seem pretty good to me.
I improved the entity collision system too, I've no idea why it did'nt occur to me before, but my entities are grouped, the helicopters bits are 1 object, and the enemies gibs are another object, when creating an entity I just pass the limb number that I want and the other limbs are hidden. The collision system was just checking the object position, so really collision on 1 point, with a leg, that meant that the collision point would be on the stump bit, and the foot could easily fall through the floot. This time, I offset the limb pivots for each part so the object centre was where it should be, and the pivots are at each end of the limb, like with a leg, the pivot is set to the foot. This way I get 2 set's of coordinates to check and legs can't fall through the floor. They tend to stick up though, but that's just funny so I probably won't fix that (not sure where to start anyway).
I sat my mom in front of Lonewolf last night and she had a great time
- my little brother commented that it's far too violent, but she was too busy removing heads to notice - there's something disturbing about hearing your mom cackle at a load of severed bodyparts. This is definately my most playable game yet.
My next plan is to add exploding entities, I'll upload a new video once I have some decent frag footage.
Van-B
It's c**p being the only coder in the village.
