Scattering rockets

Here's some fun pathing for rockets that have a mind of their own. They are all start in the same place, with the same driving forces, but gradually they find their own path in this crazy world, just like... English teachers.

AI pathing

I've started working on rewriting the AI to control the bombers. My last iteration had a basic state machine and a whole lot of role specific code. I'm adding a task based stack. The top action is the only one that runs and when it determines it's completed itself it is removed. So it's also pretty simple to queue things up, or interrupt and resume. For example my bomber right now has a dive bombing mode where it does this: Goto(NextAttackPosition) DiveBomb(UntilTooClose). I added a small flag when the bomber is taking a lot of fire. The AI checks this against a threshold and adds a temporary AvoidFire action that runs for a few seconds. When things have cooled off it resumes DiveBombing.

The hardest part about AI is debugging it, so have custom debugging visuals for each action - something that would be a lot harder if the code was organized differently. Look at the pretty colored lines!! And these JPGs suck, so sorry about that.

Rebuilding Libraries

Of all the tasks one encounters when programming, building open source libraries is by far the least enjoyable. Mac OS X support isn't necessarily a primary concern of the maintainers and this usually means that whatever crappy makefile or project files are available are hopelessly out of date.

At least XCode generally allows you to just throw a bunch of source and frameworks at it and let it work, until you need to do something as remarkably common as bundle a framework with your app. You would think an application would be able to search it's own frameworks folder and the system frameworks folder to resolve dynamic libraries. But hey Mach-O is not my preferred executable format. zing!

So anyway. No screenshot for the day. Because building libraries sucks.

Sky and Night

I've been playing with sky effects and nighttime rendering. I like the darkness of night because laser blasts and explosions contrast so much better against them. This shot involves a skybox, blended with a skydome, and a black fog effect over the terrain. I like it in some areas, but convergences need some work and it looks worse and works the higher up you go. It would be nice to add clouds, but I really need to get back to core gameplay and not snazzy graphic effects.