Developer Diary 26

I have been working like crazy on the monastery interiors and on the soundscape these last couple of weeks. Always in the hopes of finally getting to a decent result, a screenshot containing the monks walking towards the broken and hurt people lying in the courtyard or even a trailer segment including VO and Music.

About two months ago, I sidestepped a severe AI problem. The blueprint nodes that were responsible for character movements were bugged in the latest versions of UE4 ("Move to Random Point in Radius" doesn't work for some people, and I'm one of the unlucky ones). I figured: Just give them a couple of weeks and there will be enough posts in the UE4 forums, and one of these days you'll be able to fix this. So I jumped on the architecture and on the VO. The good thing is: Both are almost finished, but my AI is behaving like .... actually it's not behaving at all. It's just standing there. Glaring into nothing.

There is a workaround: Control the AI not through the Event Graph inside the Character Blueprint, but instead through a complex system including Behaviour tree, Blackboard and AI Controller Files. Sooner or later I would need to learn this system anyway, because it is easier on the overall performance and it's industry standard to work with Pawns in this way (so other programmers would be able to use these files from the get go). But to this day I failed each and every single tutorial video that explained how this system works. I just can't wrap my head around it or get stuck on another bug in the engine. And the Event Graph system would be soooooo much easier to implement ...

I want the monks to be able to talk to each other, and to the wounded soldiers lying around the courtyard. I want the giant mechanic soldiers in the woods to move intelligently towards the player and target areas around him, so the player will be driven towards them and not away from them. But all this takes time..

I guess every developer is stunned by how impossible it is to stay in line with set deadlines even when you were dead sure that you would be able to meet them. I can't very well bitch at crew members for not keeping deadlines if I'm no better myself. Lesson learned. Moving on. Day by day, hour by hour, minute to minute.