Spiritus Astrum

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.

I have made several improvements to the project, including improvements to the grass exclusion system.

I have added instancing to the grass, to fix a bug which causeed the grass exclusion texture to duplicate across neighbouring terrain chunks.

The next major goal is to work on the preliminary support for the dynamic story system.

This will require a lot of work.

I have the system mostly planned out now.

The next goals are to improve the user interaction system, and to randomly spawn NPC’s in the world that the player can interact with. There are also other preliminary features that I need to add.

I can then work on adding the immersive features and story features themselves.

I ran into a few additional issues which were caused by the changes that I made to the loading system (in order to fix the other bug that I found), but I have solved these issues now too.

I have also tested the random world generator, and made some changes and improvements. There is still quite a lot to do here to add realistic and unique worlds, but the system is basically working at the moment.

I will probably spend a little more time on fixing other minor issues with the project, and then decide how to proceed with the dynamic story generator and immersive elements in the next few days.

I have spent a lot of time planning the next phase of the project. I will be focusing on the first version of the dynamic story generator, in addition to more immersive and role-playing elements.

This will be a lot of work, but I intend to get a concept of it working within the next few months.

The first step is to add the preliminary support system for the story generator and immersive elements.

One of these is to add random spawning of interactable items within the world. This had been done, but is quite basic for now, I will work on extending it later.

These objects now spawn in all earthlike and habitable alien worlds, and allow the player to find food and resources even if they have no supplies with them.

Most of the immersive elements and improvements will be in the form of craftable items and structures, which should provide the ability for the player to survive, and live, anywhere within the world.

I also want to start adding in buffs/debuffs and other character elements, in addition to the random story generator itself.

I have foud, and fixed, a fundamental bug within the project.

This bug was intermittent, and hard to track down. It was caused by the load order of various objects and systems in the project.

I am using scheduled functions to load all objects, combined with a flag-based system to make sure that one function completes before another starts.

In one case, I was running two functions within the same flag-block, so in some cases one of these functions would complete out of sequence, which would advance the flag to the next state before all objects had loaded in, meaning that the position shift to place the player in the world would occur before all objects had loaded, so those objects would be in the wrong place.

I had to rewrite some of my loading code to handle this situation, which also involved rewriting quite a bit of other code, but I have fixed this problem now.

I don’t know if this is related to the other issue that I am having with player saved positions ocassionally being wrong, but it could be.

The multi-threaded scanning function for terrain objects is working, and the entire system seems to be quite solid.

While working on this I also found, and fixed, some other long-standing bugs within the terrain and ground cover systems, which I also fixed.

There is one bug remaining within this system now, and that is that when the scanning function runs at the same time that the terrain itself is subdividing (Such as when the player is moving) the scanning function can fail.

This is likely due to the scanning function being multi-threaded, and accessing the same data that the terrain subdivision function is using.

Other than that, this feature seems to work well.

The next goal that I am working on is adding multi-threading support to the world/terrain scanning system.

This system basically scans nearby terrain chunks recursively and predicts where cities, outposts, objects, etc will be placed before they are created by the game.

This system is critical for things like AI transport between cities, player navigation to distance cities, and trade links, etc, between nearby cities or bases.

It will also be a good opportunity to further test multithreaded code in unity.

However, since it is a recursive function, it is very expensive, so it needs to be multi-threaded.

So far, this is going ok, and it seems to be mainly working, but I will have to make some change to the existing terrain generation system to make sure that the random seed values match up.

I haven’t fully tested this, but it seems quite promising.