Knights Province devblog

Taking a break from Caster, did a playtest and found and fixed a bunch of smaller issues:

• Stone/Iron/Gold decals will be shown on the minimap correctly now
• Stone roads will have more tints and become a bit darker
• Group direction selector now previews all members locations
• House tablets will be placed with a little random rotation
• Forts “train” button will properly update on stock change now
• Iron/Gold house plans will be shown correctly now
• Scripting will now use TKMHouseType/TKMUnitType/TKMWareType instead of IDs (described in previous post)
• several more minor issues

Caster issues continue to occur, but also grows the list of fixed ones. When before Caster was tested 100% in a staged environment, now it is 50/50 between staged and actual game.

Some of the issues are:

• Agent needs to walk through in-between 2 locked agents
• Agent should not hesitate approaching another agent if his target is in front of him
• Group of agents walking through corridor should not clog it while trying all to register at a waypoint
• Agents approaching house entrances from the side often look unnatural

On a different note – while staging in-game tests for Caster, I got frustrated with how unit/house/ware types were hard to use. This got me thinking and testing, what if enums were available? And they seem to be. For a quick example:

procedure OnTick(aTick: Integer);
var
H: Integer;
begin
H := States.HouseAt(6, 7);

if (States.HouseWareInside(H, wt_Grain)) >= 5 then
Actions.PlayerWin([0], True);
end;

Now this syntax should be much easier to use!

Good news – work continues!

Over the weekend I have successfully corrected the problem with two or more agents going for the same target and getting stuck, because no one had a clear priority over others. I have tried two different ideas and choose the best.
Also greatly improved pushing out of idle agents.
Changes and improvements were also made to other parts, such as pathfinding and selection of the next waypoint en route.
Many additions were also made to the debug rendering, for easier isolation of problems and debugging.

Now there are two relatively easy problems:
– In the narrow corridor agents often interfere with their neighbors, if they did not touch the waypoint while walking past it. Here the solution is already known – needs just implementing and debug.
– Idle agents are much too “scared” sometimes. If some other agents approaches them and stops one tile short, they run back around 1/5 of tile. I still need to re think how to solve that, because this behavior is a part of the interaction and collision avoidance algorithms.

All-in-all everything is going pretty well so far 🙂