AI under the hood, UMA, Characters and Levels

I've got some basic UMA integration into the project. UMA is Universal Multipurpose Avatar, it has a basemesh for Male and Female characters, some rudimentary clothing accessories and massive capabilities for generating random characters or tweaking every detail of a character's face or body.

So far I've only played with making a custom character in the provided example scene, serializing it, then reloading it later at runtime. It's quite efficient since the base mesh is just fed a bunch of variables and changed per them.

I've got some rockin' level design going now, big improvements to the visuals. The stock kits I've been using have been getting really overhauled, the textures are significantly different now and I'm working on some fresh models and unique applications for them to deviate from the standard look which really helps the game look unique.

Full Image

I've made some progress with AI, but still no significant leaps.

I think I'm going to stick with what I have right now and work on prototyping some combat behaviors and see where that takes me. I can always come back and polish a system since they're all totally segregated and independent from each other.

Heres the latest on the AI:

Inside the design

With the Flight System basically sorted out I've moved to the interiors for the game and brought over the First Person stuff, tweaked it up and started looking at ways to slap the two together as well as working on the playable interior areas, character generator, flying straight from space to ground level of a planet, researching how to do better audio, character speech, design AI and a bunch of other little things.

Working on the level interior has been interesting, I've figured out the basics of lightmapping and batching that will help keep the interior's buttery smooth ingame and realized that making interesting interiors is more of a challenge than I expected.

Also, the Elevator. kthx.

Other than that I've worked on improving the overall atmosphere in the space scenes, put together some basic AI with a physics driven motor that can effectively wander and avoid collisions almost completely, investigated randomly generated characters to be able to store them and inject them into the game later by script, made some minor advancements on the ship GUI and other small features.

Hoorah! It's looking better every day. I'm sure the videos are kind of boring to watch for most of you, but for me the things they show are good, solid improvements and progress. Next video should showcase a pretty significant update, either 1) active characters ingame, 2) entering atmospheres from space with landing on the terrain or 3) AI battles. It's all some distance away and needs a lot of work to make any of them happen but I'm inching closer to them all the time.