Greetings Pioneers!

Proper footage has crept out of the studio showing our revisions to the AI behaviour systems today, and it’s right below for your eyes and ear holes to consume! Feast on the work in progress that now allows parrying and stealthy approaches to sticky situations.

Here’s what everyone else has been upto:

John – Lead Designer

They call me the Juggler, the bouncing man, the forwards and backwards walker. I’m there, then i’m here, then i’m there again. Never in one spot at any given time. The transporter, the transmitter of information, I’m now in your mind, and you had better get that work done or I’ll be in your house.

Matt – Art Director

We’ve been moving our designs into world machine to get a feel for the new island layout. This incorporates sections of the previous layout and topology so it won’t be all that unfamiliar. The main brain bender is getting the points of interests to work well within the new styling of the environment.

New locales must be visible from others and so forth, so journeys can be visualised and planned by players to these new and mysterious places.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have been debugging a few issues with the code that manages Hives in the world. Seems to be working fine now. I’ve also been putting some more work into the ‘Point of Interest’ component. This will enable us to add extra functionality to our AI by marking items in the world which will get their attention. This component will also be able to give instruction to the AI to perform certain tasks.

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week I have been continuing working on some satisfying axe melee kill moves for finishing off enemies with a crunch. I have also been working on some new tiny Mite varieties, I think i will need to add some stomp finishers…

Olly – Junior Programmer

I’ve been continuing with my coding of the new vehicle system. I added some optimized traces to the front of the prototype so that players will be able to knock down trees or destroy them completely if they hit them with enough speed. It was also discovered that this new feature, when used on other players causes them to go flying into the air like a ragdolled superman.

Tom – Designer

I’ve spent most of this week inside World Machine and the Unreal Material Editor, taking lots of inspiration from the open worlds found inside AC: Origins and ME: Andromeda. It’s been a slow process, but I’m confident that we’re approaching

Sam – Concept Artist

I’ve been continuing with my work for the vehicles. After a few reviews this week and a lovingly positioned pioneer silhouette from Lauren I feel we are pretty close to the finished product.

 

Andy – Lead QA

After a few teething issues with the initial update of the engine to 4.17 we have been cooking and compiling like mad but managed to get into the game and begin our all encompassing tests. There are a few issue with turrets not attacking AI which we believe is down to the new AI logic Lee has been working on, but other than that is it all looking good.  

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

 

Greetings Pioneers!

Looks like all you wonderful people will be getting two updates this week! As this update is a few days overdue (technical difficulties 😉 ).

So we’re shaking things up a bit with an AI feature! As you may have heard in previous blogs our AI has been getting major work to add some variations in behaviours, decreasing their zombie-like *move towards player in a straight line and attack* and making that move towards a little more interesting, introducing some flanking behaviour into the mix and generally giving them a bit more life.

Now to pass on to Marcin and Lee for more information:

There are a number of changes we made to the way AI work, some for optimisation and some to make the design process easier.

Spawning optimisations

We are in the process of creating all the AI we need in the game at the very start and not actually destroying creatures anymore because of the hits we were getting on the garbage collector. We will have a pool of creatures ready to be used and returned to the pool once they are no longer needed.

Faster Iteration

The underlying code for the AI has been streamlined so we can have a base AI blueprint which then allows designers to change and tweaks settings to create any type of AI they require in the game from flying and walking to swimming creatures. Entire families of creatures can now be created where different specimen inherit the basic functionality of the archetype, but are able to add their own flavour, such as different visual, different attacks, different animations and reactions.

AI Perception

The perception component has had some improvements and tweaks to the way it detects objects within its field of view to make it feel more real. An addition which has been added to this is to allow the designers to place points of interest within the level or on objects which will pique the interest of any passing AI. The AI can investigate sounds and look for nearby food. We have also re-designed and streamlined how the AI picks its targets and what it does when it cannot reach it.

Modular code

The planners which govern the decision making of the AI have had an overhaul which makes designers’ lives a lot easier to modify and reuse the AI code across multiple creatures. Characteristics of behaviours can be tweaked or changes to the way a behaviour works per creature can now be made from the planner blueprint. This allows us to add a lot more variety to behaviours very quickly and easily.

A side effect of the work to do with planners has enabled us to create a mini planner which we can use for one-off scripted events or in situations where we want AI to run a few set tasks with minimal overhead and processing.

Fun Combat

The most important thing of course about all this AI work is to make sure killing them is fun. Dealing damage is only one aspect of it. We want to make sure the full experience is engaging and rewarding. The combat we’ve had so far was just so relentless and repetitive it got old very quickly. There was no room to breathe, no sense of control, no reward for doing well, and no depth. We have tried very hard to make sure the player has more options and more control.

Combat improvements

You are no longer immediately attacked the instant the creature spots you. The creature will now try to scare you off first. You can back off and leave it at that, or you show them who’s boss.

Creatures now take some time to respite after attacking giving you both an opportunity to consider your next move.

You can block with melee weapons. If the combat feels overwhelming, you can stop swinging your weapon wildly and block instead. You will have the room to breathe and assess your situation.

You can parry with melee weapons. If you time your blocking just right, you can parry the creature attack. Not only does that interrupt the creature’s attack but also makes them vulnerable for a time. We are still sorting out the details of what exactly that means, but killing a vulnerable creature should be easy and rewarding.

You can run. Sometimes you don’t want to fight, either because you don’t feel you can win or because ain’t nobody got time for that. You can now run away and the creatures will eventually leave you alone.

Stability. AI creatures now have a secondary stat, called stability. It appears as a blue bar below their health bar. Being able to send creatures flying with the Blast module was fun but overpowered. Now you need to deprive the creature of its stability for it to ragdoll, which is a little harder than a single click of a button, although not by much in most cases. Some creature are easier killed than staggered, some the exact opposite. You as a player should consider the right tool for the job.

Hit reactions. Your melee attacks are now able to interrupt the attack of the creature if it’s weaker than you. Wildly flailing your melee weapon at a bunch of enemies is no longer suicidal but sometimes just what the doctor ordered.

Overall these improvements should allow us to keep AI interactions fun and rewarding while keeping it easy for us to manage and put together different behaviours for a variety of circumstances. When we’re done AI should feel more reactive to what you are doing and feel smarter without it being overwhelming.

As for when you will see these in game, it is a matter of getting it up to a level of polish that we are satisfied with and making sure we iron out the remaining bugs!
We would also be looking to deliver these changes as part of the wider feature release.
In short… when it’s ready… 😉

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

Greetings Pioneers!

Progress is developing nicely as always! We’ve made a choice to move to a new sky system that allows us to be more dynamic with weather and atmospherics. Vehicles and AI and still at the top of the list, and we’ve been testing our new modular behavior structures, where we have created three variants of the ‘mite’, each of which with a different attack type, more about that below…

John – Lead Designer

This has been another hectic week of balancing the materials and crafting with Mr. Whittemore, hashing out the finer details of the multiplayer designs with Tristan and Andy, and looking longly out of the window waiting for Matts return.

Matt – Art Director

Back in action, mainly catching up with the team and getting focused on the additional vehicle design work that has been done, a lot of which is focused around getting a scale that feels good set in stone.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have continued to work with identifying bugs we have with the new version of the engine. I’ve also been working on some designs for controlling AI so you can command them to work for you.

Tristan – Lead Developer

This week I have been working on tweaking the interaction systems with Eden star to make it so that we can interact with the world easier. I have also been fixing up some multiplayer interaction issues as well as helping to design our new multiplayer experiences and systems.

Ricky – Senior Developer

Continuing fixing bugs from the engine update. I’ve potentially found a network replication mismatch and a problem with getting stuck on the loading screen which looks so far like we have to optimise the game to fix it fully, though I found a temporary fix for the time being so the rest of our fair and growing team can continue unhindered.

Olly – Junior programmer

With the help of Tristan and Tom I have continued my work on the vehicle system. More specifically moving our initial prototype into code.

Tom – Designer

I hate sand, it’s coarse and rough and gets everywhere. It’s also been a lot of fun working on some lovely new sand dunes for our more arid sections of landscape. The next stage is working on nice, natural looking transitions between the areas, which should be an exciting challenge! Really looking to showing you guys the final results!

Marcin – Designer

I’ve spent the week fixing bugs with the new AI behaviours and attacks, such as:

• an attack would immediately get performed again after it was interrupted. The interrupt, it does nothing.
• If an attack was performed that allows another attack to be performed immediately after, all future attacks would be performed without delay. Rapidfire mode.
• some attacks would cause the creature to float, sometimes far into the distance. Super-disengage.
• Some behaviours had the creature suddenly turn away from the target and stay that way, looking very upset but claiming everything was fine.

Additionally, I’ve started working on the stalker creature, reworking it to fit the new system. Right now I am expanding how we are manipulating the Ai speed for various behaviours and how more complex attacks, such as ones involving custom movement can have additional conditions between phases. For example, a running attack can skip a telegraph phase if the creature is already running, but include it if it’s not.

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week I have been helping Marcin out with some of the AI locomotion animations and their native speeds. I have also been continuing with the finishing moves and 3rd person animations for the Axe.

Andy – Lead QA

I’ve been continuing with the multiplayer design documentation, making sure that all aspects have been considered and accounted for.
We also got a new merge for the updated version of the engine so myself and Jamie managed to get into a multiplayer game and test and report issues that we found with Multiplayer.

Sam Russell – Concept Artist

A single seater vehicle is pretty much a must for an exploration survival game, this is where I’m at with some of the basic shapes.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix