I have spend a few days testing, debugging, and optimising the new city features.
They were causing significant slowdowns in the project, but I tracked this down to the animators on the guis that I was using.
I made several optimisation improvements to these, as well as paging in/out various objects in the world, and this significantly improved performance.
The next goal is to test and improve the AI navigation a little more.
I have added a small number of new items that the player can purchase within cities only, and I have added more vendors and vending machines that the player can buy items from.
In addition to that, I have improved the AI NPC code to add unique names for each NPC. This should increase immersion during player interactions.
I have also fixed some bugs where the player and AI positions were incorrect when they interacted with objects in the enviroment.
The next goal is to optimise and test the city more, and then spend some more time on the AI graph system, there are still issues here that I would like to look at further.
The basic “jobs” that the player can do are now mostly working.
I have also added more interactivity for the various city objects, so that the player, and AI, can interact with more objects in the world.
Even though the number of different actions and interaction options are limited at the moment, there are enough to allow the player to successfully live and survive in a city, in the same way that they can live and survive outside cities (by finding and crafting items, etc).
I have also fixed several bugs and added more smaller improvements to the project.
The artwork for the city decoration objects is done.
I am now in the process of importing it into unity and setting it up.
I have to scale and rotate some of the objects and mounting points so that the art looks correct in the world.
This is mostly working fine, and the city does look at lot less spartan with this artwork added.
The next goal is to add some very simple options for the player to earn credits within the city.
I have made several improvements to the procedural city builder. The system should now spawn a lot more decorations and other world objects in the scene.
The next goal is to model these. I will keep the art simple for now, I am mainly trying to add greater immersion and gameplay features, that art is not a priority for the moment.
The artwork and texturing is mostly done, and the importing should be done in a few days. I can then work on adding the new features.
I ran into a minor issue with pseudo-random seeds not being reproducible.
This was causing the NPC’s that were being generated to change with each run of the game. This has now been fixed.
I have also fixed some additional issues with the NPCAI. There is more work to be done here, but I am ready to move on to the next part of the project.
The next goal is to add some more basic decorations to the city, to make it look more visually interesting. I then want to add more interactive features for the player to use.
The NPCAI system is almost done, but there are still some last minute issues with transitioning from exterior to interior graphs, and navigation and pathfinding.
I have added basic logic to the system that will allow the NPC to enter and leave the various buildings within the city, but there is more testing required.
I have also fixed some issues with the vehicle navigaton system.
I needed to make extensive changes to my custom AI navigation code in order to get the NPCAI to work.
The system now supports multiple paths and multiple NPC’s, and the NPC can transition properly from the exterior graph to the interior one.
There are still a lot of intermittent bugs and issues to work on, but I am making progress.
After finishing some minor bug fixes and improvements to the apartments, I have moved on to adding support for NPC’s to enter, leave, and move around, within apartment interiors.
This is proving to be very difficult. The AI has to leave one nav graph (The exterior city graph) and enter another one. There are quite a number of issues and problems arising from this.
I have succeeded in getting the NPC’s placed on the navgraph, but the logic for navigation and pathfinding is causing issues.
