Progress Report (2012-02-14) | Project Porcupine | Forum

Post edited 3:27 pm – February 14, 2012 by quill18

I've been very busy lately, especially with trying to learn EU3 and the other Paradox games, but I had time to get back to programming last night and added some more features:

• Completed the player's targeting system.
• You can now click your toolbar button (or use the number keys as shortcut) and enter targeting mode.  You can use TAB to cycle between targets.  It defaults to whatever you had targeted last time, or the closest enemy.  Hit ENTER to end targeting mode and shoot the enemy.
• Enemies die when they run out of hit points.
• Refactored how AI vision works, for the millionth time.
• AI's keep realtime lists of all visible enemy and friendly targets, sorted by distance.
• AI's will chase their closest visible enemy.  If they lose track of all targets, they will move to the last known position.
• Modeled a basic ship module "room" (a room is about 5x5 "tiles" big) and made a "ship" out of them (in a 3x3 configuration) to walk around in.  Tested out mesh colliders for the wall/floor physics and everything feels perfect.
• Added a "faction" system for friend-or-foe identification. Right now, the player is team 0 and everything else is team 1, but we could make things far more interesting, going forward.  Creatures without factions are hostile to everything.

Next up:

• Make AI units damage their enemies (right now, by bumping into them and meleeing)
• Add real pathfinding (right now they just move directly towards their target, which works surprisingly fine because they always have line of sight to their target — but we will probably want AIs to be able to wander around, and maybe react to unseen sounds)

Next Next Up:

• Create a system for more interesting and varied attack types, both in terms of result (typed damage, damage over time, status effects) and visuals (instant beams and bullets with travel time, as well as melee visuals for slashes and thuds)
• Feedback for health, both for the player and other creatures
• Some kind of "death" animation. For now, spawn some simple cube "gibs" and have then get flung far and wide for a dramatic physics effect, which should look cool with the pausing.
• Create a system for creating creatures and their abilities via XML or YAML configuration files

Once we complete the Next Next Up phase, we've reached the point were we have created a single level, sort-of tactical arcadish game.  Like a mini Gauntlet or something.  Assuming half-decent level generation and a bit of added content, it could actually be fun to play as-is.

Well, I'm using "creatures" to mean anything that can take actions. That might be alien monsters, but also other humans and droids and such.

Yes, absolutely, emailing them to quill18@towerdive.com is fine!

We still don't know what the art direction will be, so anything you send will help set the theme!