Really, ages. My last post was near the start of September now we're coming up to the end of November. My silence obviously means I've gotten my head down and done tons of work. In fact I have an AAA game ready to launch and I'm giving you all a playable demo... Right? Well not exactly..
I've actually spent long periods not touching my game, works kept me busy, I've had a holiday and I've chosen what I want to do next year for a final year project and started some prep work for that. (My prep work is an implementation of an Artificial Neural Network using Simulated Annealing to learn instead of Back Propagation with the aim of using it for Online Learning). And I've been playing around with python. And playing some games which I'm of course going to call research so it seems I've been really busy. But I haven't.
A lot of what I've been doing is trying to put GOAP into my game and that kind of stalled it's a big architecture change and I wanted it to add it in and not remove anything, then remove the stuff it was replacing. So right now I have two partial AI systems. And I'm beginning to question GOAP based on the overhead of implementation. A bit too late for that so I'm just going to stick to my plan for now.
However while I stew on project strategies there is a completely neglected area I can work on... And that's art. Bloody god damn 3D freaking art. So this weekend I knuckled down set up my model for animation made a simple walking animation in 30 minutes then put it into the game to make sure it worked.
I implemented a stub controller I called __FollowPlayerControl (the double underscores are my way of saying this is not production standard). and got it to activate the animation when walking and stop it when not walking, and to follow me.
Now that meant I could only get a front view of the player walking so I just removed the stop so I could give you all a video with side and front views. In hindsight I should have just made it so I could specify a point the character should walk to and then follow it. getting all the angles I want. However its too late for that and its just more test code to rip out so I'm not going to go to the trouble for now.
Also you may remember my last video, the laggy low frame rate screen capture spectacular. Well I found out JMonkey has a class called VideoRecorderAppState that when attached to the AppStateManager records video. So now I've added a button to start recording and stop recording to my game and the recordings are so much better. No more screen capture software for me which is a relief I can tell you.
So without further adieu:
In terms of the animation on the return the foot drags too much and its too bouncy. It's kind of like a bad caricature of a walk. Oh and the green lines that's a navmesh I generated on the fly, still there from debugging.
Hopefully I'll start getting back into the swing of things and be able to keep you entertained with tons of progress in the weeks and months to come!
Daniel
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