It's been a while since the last update so I thought I'd share what's going on.
Currently I'm mostly focusing on finishing ShadowNet since it's so close to an enjoyable version. There's just a few things missing: assault contracts, item selling, magic and the matrix.
All of them already have a part of it done, but are still way unfinished.
Once all of these are in place, I'll make a save system to keep the progress and from then on, the story of the game is all that's left.
There's plenty of other stuff I'd like to add, and I'll likely add it, but probably after the story is complete.
It's AI time! Previous artificial intelligence wasn't so "intelligent". It would stumble upon walls, waste clips on walls, and so on. So a rework was mandatory. I'm using A* search algorithm, which absolutely blew my mind how simple the theory is, and how effective it is! In the image you can see how the NPC is trying to get from point A to point B (green line) calculating the least expensive path while avoiding unwalkable terrain. You may also notice the white line, which is the NPC's line of sight. If the target is not within line of sight, he won't be able to shoot. This helps hostile folks save some ammo. The system provides support for following targets, standing idle and wandering around.
Hey all! I hate to post the same stuff everywhere, so I realized it would be easier to build a system where I can just throw stuff in one place and make the code do the rest. At first I used a bot, from zapier.com but unless you pay, it's quite limited. Unwilling to pay for bots I decided to make my own system, it kind of works. Twitter will surely look bad on posts long like this one, but I'll be sure to add some link or something for the longer version. Anyhow I was expecting to make these updates somewhat shorter. Anyway I'm quite happy about the result, I hope to be posting more often now with this system up and running.
I'm testing a new post system. Twitter is good and all, but I'm trying to get rid of that ugly widget. See if I can automate my posts to keep everything updated.