Zetheros
Developer
Hey Exanimates,
We've been working on completing gameplay mechanics and making general refinements for force. In particular we worked on things like aiming, smart targeting and placement, environment interaction and some final layers of polish for the effects and their animations. At this point all this seems to be in a really good place and the only thing really left which we're actively working on now is AI interaction.
AI interaction is a broad topic and largely dependent on how much we're willing to do, now or in the future. Our AI is mostly driven by an emotion system, and that covers quite a lot of what we want implicitly, but also having done mind thaumaturgy previously we have the tools to manipulate that system. There is a lot of potential to do cool stuff here, and also an opportunity to flesh out general AI behaviour with more context, but for now we're trying to focus on the essentials. Some force powers involve various types of barriers that can collapse when receiving too much punishment, so something we need is AI engaging in combat behaviours against things other than characters or creatures. This would also include doors, dummies, targets, other objects, and things we can't talk about because spoilers, so it has a lot of future applications.
Force introduces some pretty intense visual effects, especially in terms of lighting. The game is very well optimised and so for a while now we've been thinking about what we could do with all that extra performance on recent powerful GPUs. We've been testing some ideas and when analysing the performance we found a GPU data optimisation which skyrocketed it. We then realised we could use this to boost performance in general, and somewhat ironically instead of improving visuals at the cost of performance for high end GPUs, we ended up improving performance for the low-end. We expect this will have a huge impact there, but also a substantial boost for the mid-range.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
We've been working on completing gameplay mechanics and making general refinements for force. In particular we worked on things like aiming, smart targeting and placement, environment interaction and some final layers of polish for the effects and their animations. At this point all this seems to be in a really good place and the only thing really left which we're actively working on now is AI interaction.
AI interaction is a broad topic and largely dependent on how much we're willing to do, now or in the future. Our AI is mostly driven by an emotion system, and that covers quite a lot of what we want implicitly, but also having done mind thaumaturgy previously we have the tools to manipulate that system. There is a lot of potential to do cool stuff here, and also an opportunity to flesh out general AI behaviour with more context, but for now we're trying to focus on the essentials. Some force powers involve various types of barriers that can collapse when receiving too much punishment, so something we need is AI engaging in combat behaviours against things other than characters or creatures. This would also include doors, dummies, targets, other objects, and things we can't talk about because spoilers, so it has a lot of future applications.
Force introduces some pretty intense visual effects, especially in terms of lighting. The game is very well optimised and so for a while now we've been thinking about what we could do with all that extra performance on recent powerful GPUs. We've been testing some ideas and when analysing the performance we found a GPU data optimisation which skyrocketed it. We then realised we could use this to boost performance in general, and somewhat ironically instead of improving visuals at the cost of performance for high end GPUs, we ended up improving performance for the low-end. We expect this will have a huge impact there, but also a substantial boost for the mid-range.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
