So it’s been a busy month.\u00a0 But not so much for MT2.<\/p>\n
Most of my time has been going into paying work.\u00a0 But I’ve been getting some things done in MT2 around the edges.\u00a0 Most notably, I’ve hooked up a new system for generating roads and paths.\u00a0 I’m pretty happy with it.\u00a0 I’ll show some screenshots in the next few days.\u00a0 Basic idea is that it now carves the roads into the terrain, basically overwriting the themed terrain type.\u00a0 You can continue building terrain underneath the road;\u00a0 the road just floats over the terrain surface (carved down into it).<\/p>\n
I’ve been spending a lot of my time looking into AI bugs in the simulation.\u00a0 I finally tracked down a problem which caused AI developers to occasionally slow down a lot when approaching a work site.\u00a0 It was extreme enough that in my usual AI testbed level, the developer which was given the job of building the Inn would usually take so long to reach the building site that all the other AI developers would complete at least two queued jobs before the Inn-building developer even arrived to start constructing the building.\u00a0 I fixed the bug (it was to do with the path variation code which causes entities to not precisely follow the “shortest possible path” to their destination.\u00a0 The developer ended up in a version of Zeno’s Paradox, infinitely choosing to travel just 30% of the way to the target, and taking forever to actually reach the destination).\u00a0 Fixing that bug also seems to have fixed another problem I’ve seen a few times;\u00a0 AI players who eventually stop moving, while in the middle of questing.\u00a0 If a monster comes up to them they’ll fight it, but otherwise they just stand still and don’t do anything.\u00a0 Haven’t seen that again since fixing the bug, so I’m guessing that they were being affected by the same bug.<\/p>\n
Regardless, I’m getting back into AI refactoring.\u00a0 There’s still some awkward bits in the AI code, particularly around quest handling.\u00a0 And things appear to go catastrophically wrong (ie: crashy) when someone completes all available quests in the game and wants to do another quest.\u00a0 A little code cleanup should set that right, I hope.<\/p>\n
A big concern I have right now is the terrain rendering.\u00a0 The new infinite-zoom terrain system (which I love, and can’t imagine why I didn’t implement it in the first place) is fantastic, but the terrains don’t look so great from above — the visual style was kind of designed to be seen from a forward-view, not a down-view;\u00a0 it was intended to consist of color-only, with textures used to add edge detail, while still maintaining the smooth color appearance.\u00a0 And it just doesn’t read well from a top view.<\/p>\n