P-167: Paranoia: Update 14: AI Characters: Seeker

I have completed one of the two characters in this project. This is the “seeker” it is intended to be an emaciated, slightly grotesque looking character that will not attack the player, but will shriek loudly if they see the player, alerting the “hunter” to the players position.

There will be several seekers randomly generated, and hidden around the level. They will be difficult to spot, which should add to the tension in the game.

The idea is that these characters can see very well, and are therefor sensitive to the players flashlight, but they have poor hearing, meaning the player doesn’t need to slow down or watch their footing when around them.

Conversely, the “Hunter” has excellent hearing, and tracks the player primarily using this sense, but is almost blind, and will only visually detect the player at close range.

This means that the hunter will immediately react to the “shrieks” of the seekers, and the player, if they run, knock something over, etc, but the player can hide by remaining perfectly still or moving very slowly.

I think this dynamic should produce a tense, suspenseful atmosphere in the game.

I used makehuman to produce the base model, and then modified and textured this myself. I have used mixamo to rig and animate the model, but I am not yet sure how to get this animated model into T3D.

I can download files from mixamo in .dae format, these files contain the base character mesh and another file for each ainmaton. I assume I will need to use the ai characters .cs file to load the ainmations into the base model.

I also learned that makehuman unwraps it’s models for you, which is very useful, since I find UV unwrapping very difficult. I didn’t notice this with my Phoenix Avatar from P168, since I had modified the makehuman model extensively, which broke the UV map.