Today I noticed just how broken the AI is in multiple-monster-versus-one-PC situation.  For example… When several monsters are attacking a PC and kill him, the monster which scored the killing blow will immediately go back to its spawn point, while the other monsters won’t notice that the kill happened, and will chase the PC to…

I took a break from development yesterday, but I’m back to it today. New today: PCs now can see QuestGivers from only 40 meters away (TODO:  consider reducing to closer to 20 meters).  If a PC moves within that distance from a QuestGiver that he doesn’t already know about, he’ll stop whatever he’s doing and…

So today I worked on the “getting jumped on by too many monsters” problem that I mentioned yesterday. First thing I did was to adjust the block used to represent PCs and monsters.  Those blocks were a really weird size;  I’ve fixed them to be approximately the dimensions of a standing human, so it’s easier…

This is the story of Kerry Fox, the single player who I’m letting run around in my MMORPG Tycoon game right now, to make AI debugging simpler. Things I’ve been doing and noticing: In v1.1, the “Grind out a level” AI state just made someone wander around the region at random.  That worked, because in…

One of the things I learned while developing MMORPG Tycoon is how important it is to have a repeatable test case, when you’re developing complicated AI behaviour.  A way to run the same situation several times, to help debug why a misbehaving character is doing what he’s doing. In most games, this isn’t a big…