Attack slots

The AI on Gateway searches for an attack slot on the target. That’s used to stop the AIs from clustering on a single position. They request an attack slot to the target, and they keep refreshing it, until they lose it if they don’t target it anymore.

Until now, the attack slots were attributed in order, so the first enemy would always try to use the first attack slot, which in terms of position would correspond to the northeast of the enemy, even if it was coming from the southwest… This would make it LOOK stupid (even if it was a more visual thing than game impacting, since it would start to shoot as long as it had range, so it’s basically the same game-wise), so I tweaked the code to consider its position relative to the player in choosing the attack slot, which looks much better and smarter!

In the process I found a balancing issue… The gun is firing too fast, which means the enemy will not give much of a chance to the player if it doesn’t have obstacles.

I can tweak the variables (cycle time of the weapon) to adjust for this, but I think this is a very non-intuitive way to tweak the weapons, so I’m thinking of adding a new “shoot decision system” for the AIs, more not to an actual cycle, but a cooldown/fire mechanism, which will probably work much more intuitively in terms of balancing…

Now listening to “Voices of Doom” by “Mono Inc.”

Now playing “Wasteland 2”… The game is rather cool, but it has some awful flaws, mostly because of the intentions of keeping in touch with its past, like too many “skills” that are basically pointless except in a mission or another… I understand what they wanted to do with the game, but for example if you don’t take the “Brute Force” skill in one character, you won’t be able to do some parts of the main game story properly. You can say “yeah, but that’s decisions”, but it’s a false one… I can move that specific door with that skill on that mission, but I don’t have any interest in having that skill in the rest of the game (so far), so it’s asking me to chose between a super-useful skill like “machine guns” (which I use every 2 minutes) for one that might be really useless in most of the game. A system like Shadowrun’s skill traversal would be better, in my opinion (if you don’t have a skill, you can use an associated attribute… in this case, if you didn’t have the “Brute Force” skill, you’d be able to use “Strength” as a substitute, at a penalty. The end result could be the same, but I wouldn’t have the feeling the game cheated). Other than that, the atmosphere’s really great, the gameplay is nice and fluid (a bit hard, but that’s a matter of taste) and the story is interesting (bar some stupid stuff that’s done to enhance gameplay but just sounds silly).