During the last, unfortunately busy weeks, I’ve been continuing where I last left: improving the trigonometry behind the behavior and refactoring the logic. In the process, I also thoroughly tested almost all AI behaviors. A tedious job, but a boring person that I am, I found it rather interesting.
Here’s a little summary:
- I made improvements and optimizations to obstacles (meteors, team mates) and weapon dodging. At the same time, I fixed a bug related to collision layers, that caused the AI not to detect nor dodge incoming lasers properly. Funny, I hadn’t noticed that earlier.
- Combatants have handedness which dictates the direction they prefer in even situations.
- Fight-or-flight behavior in critical situations is more adjustable. Also, other characteristics are now less dependent on each other, which makes them easier to tweak in the future.
- There is some inexplicable wizardry going on in tractor and pressor beam handling. I have no idea what I’ve been after with it, but since the AI is already quite competent with beams, I decided not to mess with it too much.
Only the two most difficult things are still to be done: movement and plasma orb handling. More about those later.
And in order to avoid another tell-don’t-show -post, here’s an image that introduces the new tractor and pressor beams. Direction of the beam should now be clearly visible.
