"Jefferson" Project Forum News
Posted Friday, January 31, 2003 - 23:39 CET by Veldrin

Here are today's "Jefferson" project forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

J.E. Sawyer, Lead Designer

Fed-Ex Quests: The only Fed-Ex quests in the game so far involve getting things from dangerous locations. There's no Old Jed in Jefferson waiting for a bottle of wine.

AI: There are two main things that I intially focused on for AI and pathfinding.

* Team Behavior and Problem Solving -- The "team" unit was used in Icewind Dale usually as a method of activating a group of creatures when one member saw enemies. It was also used for locating worthy recipients of buff spells, curative magic, and general protection. I think that team behavior can go beyond this in a couple of ways.

First, I think that teams need to be able to address problems by analyzing the capabilities of the group. Take a D&D example: a locked door. The PCs close a door, then lock it. The bad folks on the other side want to get through. First, is there anyone in the party capable of casting knock? If not, is there anyone in the party capable of picking a lock? If not, the most damage-capable members of that group should attack the door and utterly annihilate it. It's a seemingly simple problem, but it requires quite a bit of up-front work to make it happen.

Teams should also (when appropriate) perform their actions under the direction of leaders. If you have ten Enclave Troopers and Frank Horrigan, Frank baby is calling the shots. If someone cripples his leg, he's probably going to command all of his cronies to pump plasma into that guy's face. If one of them dies, the team should look for another ranking leader. If none exist, they act on their own in a chaotic fashion. This could be good -- or it could be bad.

Morale also tends to fall under team behavior. While a creature with low morale should probably try to flee, there are many other types of behavior he or she can exhibit. They might start to disregard orders from their commander. They might split into another team and follow the commands of another creature. They might run across the map to an allied team and join them. They might even feign death. Whatever they do, it would probably be better than running off screaming for ten seconds and then turning around to die anyway.

* Threat Pathing -- I've discussed this before. Creatures in RPGs often decide that it's very important to run right through things like minefields, lasers, and walls of magical fire. This is dumb. We've come up with a potential way of dealing with things like this. Well, it really can work. We just don't know if it can work efficiently.

All of these things are works in progress, so don't go getting your hopes up about any of them.