Hello everyone!
This is an exciting one for me 😀 There was no PTR update last Friday due to live stuff, but hopefully this makes up for it.
Changes
- Complete rewrite of player and NPC movement on the server, unifying logic.
- NPCs can now push other creatures (if they have to), when they are returning to spawn.
- Players can now push NPCs that are at least 10 levels lower than they are when outside of town.
- NPCs can be flagged as unpushable (town guards, patrols, for example).
- Ember Guards conversations now happen every 30 minutes.
- NPC “passively wander around” decision times are now varied to prevent all the wandering NPCs in an area from taking steps at the same time and looking too robotic.
- Chris has re-joined the realm to demonstrate the above. Amazing.
- Engine support for various flags on creatures.
- Admins can now toggle their “unpushable” status with a command, godmode command also toggles this.
- First fully scripted wandering NPC – Ruhin!
- Spends 2 minutes at the Sleeping Orc in Emberton (will be 2 hours but 2 minutes just for testing)
- Goes on a journey to Gilead, sightseeing along the way
- Spends 2 minutes at the Soggy Hedgehog in Gilead (will be 2 hours but 2 minutes just for testing)
- Goes on a different journey back to Emberton, sightseeing along the way
- Repeats!
What to test?
The scale of the server-side movement rewrite cannot be understated, every single aspect of how creatures traverse the world and how NPCs decided to chase or head home is all brand new code. With this in mind, I would be very grateful if people could use the trolls south east of Emberton to explore and verify that NPCs are still behaving as you would expect given various pathing challenges. A lot of what you think of as “the AI”, is actually just interactions with the pathing and movement code… so this is a big set of high risk changes.
The result however, aside from the engine having one system that manages all creatures, is that NPCs can now push other creatures just like players – so they won’t tolerate being blocked from returning home anymore, and they won’t have dancing competitions. Don’t expect the Guards to let you stand at their post anymore 🙂
In addition, I would really appreciate feedback on the new wandering npc Ruhin, he is the crown jewel of this weeks changes leveraging all aspects of the scripting engine, movement, and pathing code to have his own little adventure across the continent to his two favourite pubs. In future he will have a useful purpose, for now he is hopefully an exciting demonstration of the fruits of all the engine work I have been doing.
Best way to find him is to wait at either the pub in emberton or the pub in gilead, it’s a 15 minute round trip at the moment for him so he should appear soon enough 😀
What next?
Well, at the moment Ruhin is ignored by monsters and runs around in the dark! So this is a great opportunity to move creature lighting state over to the server so we can start managing the light creatures emit sensibly instead of just relying on every player makes light. I think I would like to have him turn his torch on as he says farewell to the guards at each town, and turn it off once he safetly reaches his destination. I also need to get him defending himself, just like a player would – and returning back to his journey once the threat has subsided.
Next week will be mostly filled with the final tasks I have on my list to tackle before we start work on the good stuff. You know, spells, combat, cast timers, AOE warnings, interrupts, buffs, debuffs, etc! So close 😀 I have some boring code housekeeping to do, some migration from hard-coded chat commands to scripts, then most notably the mechanism by which I will be able to down-scale players to certain levels so you can run low level dungeons with your friends and things like that.
So really, next week is largely tidyup with a few fun bits, but two weeks from now is when the big fun stuff starts happening! See you there.
Fhox