P0_B1

I have been working on creating a large number of new items for the project.

These will be use to increase immersion and give the player additional options with respect to survival and living in the world.

I am focusing mainly on crafting and survival for now, rather than manufactured objects, but I will be adding more manufactured objects later (Such as weapons, etc).

Once I finish adding these items, I will add additional immersion elements, such as improvements to the character system, random quests, and enemies.

This will form the basis of the primary gameplay mechanic of the project, which is exploration and random story generation.

I have made improvements to the nav map systems in the project.

There are now several filters that the player can use to display and hide various types of objects, including plots of land that the player owns, and buildings that they have constructed, etc.

This makes the nav map much more useful.

There are still some bugs and issues that need work here, but it works reasonably well.

I have now added the ability for players to purchase plots of land on planets.

Upon purchasing a plot of land, the player is given the ability to construct advanced structures on that plot of land (These cannot be constructed anywhere else).

This will form the basis for a more complex building and crafting system that the game will have.

I have also implemented and tested some more minor improvements, etc.

The new crafting system is basically done.

I am trying to keep the guis (and the entire user interface) as immersive as possible, but as the project gets more complex, I need to add more complex non-immersive features out of necessity.

For example, the crafting system displays a transparent “dummy” object which the player can then combine items with. It is possible to select from a list of items to craft and then see the progress of the item as items are added to it.

However, the player can only see the crafting dummy when in crafting mode, when out of crafting mode these dummy’s are invisible, which means that the immersion within the world is kept as high as possible.

The existing item combination system also still exists, and will be used for simpler cases.

The next goal is to allow the user to purchase plots of land, and to improve the navigation map system to allow the player to find their plot or plots of land more easily from orbit.

I will then add more craftable items and harvestable resources, and then continue on with the story generator and other gameplay features.

I have decided to postpone the dynamic story generation system until I have had time to research it further.

I am now working on substantially improving the immersion and gameplay features of the project. I am trying to create a dynamic, immersive, virtual world, and in addition to the dynamic story generation, there are several other features which need to be present.

One of these is the ability for the player to interact with the world in complex ways. So far, I have a complex item and item combination system, but this doesn’t work well for crafting. My next objective is to add a much more advanced crafting system that will supplement the existing item combination system.

Once this is done, I intend to add far more craftable items to the world, from simple objects like bows and field shelters to complex objects like buildings and habitats.

I also want to allow the player to purchase plots of land, and when purchased, they will be able to construct complex buildings on that land. These buildings can only be placed on land that the player owns, and they require energy to construct, which is a limited resource.

Simple structures and tools like the aforementions bows and field shelters, fires, etc, can be constructed from the items naturally found on wilderness areas, and so these can be made anywhere.

I have spent quite a lot of time on the random story generator.

I have come up with quite a few concepts and ideas that I would like to explore, but I need to do more research before I can actually implement this system.

What I will probably do for now is add a simple, randomised, system to provide objectives, challenges, or goals to the player. There will be limited dialog and advanced features, but I can then build on this later as I experiment further with dynamic story and narrative generation.

Even creating a simple system with randomised objectives would still be quite complex, but it should be a good starting point.

I have added the reputation system to the project, and this is of course stored server side. It is now possible for quests and other actions to increase and decrease the players reputation, which will then affect their interactions with other players, etc, etc.

Everything else seems fine, I have done some preliminary testing and discovered no major issues.

I need to make some further improvements to the dialog system now, to allow it to more easily handle complex quest prompts, etc.

I can then start working on the actual dynamic story system, in addition to further immersion features.

I have made several improvements to the AI spawning system, such as settings to control how many AI can spawn in the same building, and support for various animations such as sitting, lying, etc, and control over how likely it is for an AI to spawn in a given location.

I have also added the ability for AI to spawn randomly (with a low chance) in the world.

I had some issues here with the fact that when the AI first spawns, they are far enough away from the player that the terrain is of a low resolution and has no collision mesh.

As the player gets close, the terrain subdivides and gets more complex, and the collision mesh is added. I had to work out a way to make sure that the AI is aligned properly with the surface of the terrain.

I also had some issues with the AI colliding with the inside of some small objects, like escape pods, etc, but all of these issues were fixed.

There were also a few other major and minor issues that I fixed while working on this.

NPC’s are now randomly added to the world, and I have verified that the seed values, etc, work properly, so that the same AI appear in the same place each time.

The AI will not actually move around the world for now, but this is something that I will be adding later.

I have also added the ability to save the AI’s state to the server, so that quest progression, results, conversations, etc, can all be stored persistently.

Currently, the AI spawns only within cities. The next step is to have the AI also spawn randomly in the world, in various locations such as escape pods, abandoned buildings, etc. This will allow the player to randomly discover interesting places and receive quests from them.

I have found, and fixed, some issues with seed values not being reproduced properly between runs. This would have been a problem for the new story system because each NPC being added to the world needs to be persistent, IE, the same character model, same location, etc, between runs of the game.

I have also added improvements to the dialog and interaction systems to allow the player to interact with random NPC’s. The user will be able to trade, receive quests/missions, and ask general questions about the location or the world.

I am also going to add in a “reputation” system, so that the AI will respond differently based on the players previous actions. In future, I will also add additional variables such as the players relationship to the AI, which will be determined by their past actions and interactions, etc.