Changes & Updates:

• Business trip and bowling.
• Virtual machine issues on Windows 10.
• Accidentally destroyed a keyboard.
• Worked through some AI concepts for SRPG.
• Went to a wedding.
• Outlined stats gathering and ranking for SRPG.

I’ve been playing a lot of Borderlands lately, and one of the little touches I like in that game is the class descriptor (which is determined by a combination of your class mod and your skill tree). For example, my primary character (Mechromancer) is a Tenacious Roboteer.

Some kind of stat gathering for SRPG has been on my mind for a while, for a variety of reasons (testing, playthrough analysis, just-for-fun). Connecting these stats to a ranking/title list of some kind seems like a nice extension. Some examples are given below.

Stats:

• Locations visited
• Objects seen
• Creatures interacted with
• Creatures killed
• Quests completed
• Quests started
• Time played
• Objects collected

Titles:

• Curious Homemaker (homemaker class, has seen most of the objects in the game)
• Angry Liar (liar class, has killed most of the creatures in the game)
• Friendly Fighter (fighter class, has interacted with most of the creatures in the game)
• Wandering Wizard (wizard class, has visited every location in the game)

Another good example of this type of feature is the title system in some of the Fable games (which allow you to acquire titles via achievements of sorts, and select which one is your primary).

Went to a potluck, two white elephants and a Hygge today. Good food and good company.

Attended a wedding today and started the lengthy, tedious process of organizing for our move. We’ve filled several garbage bags with 8 years of shredded documents (might have gone overboard on record retention).

More AI notes:

• On each tick, a creature decides to perform 1 action (which can include doing nothing), and may change overall state/goal.
• Creatures always act after the player.
• Would like to support multiple types of AI states which can overlap. e.g. a creature can be annoyed and heading to the cemetery.

Thoughts around goals for AI:

• Creatures have knowledge of places, objects, other creatures, and events.
• Creatures have motivations and emotional states (hunger, fear, work, etc).
• Creatures have immediate goals (pick up the barrel), short-term goals (walk to work), and general goals (don’t die).
• Creatures inherit knowledge (name of guard captain) and behavior (attack goblins on sight) from factions.
• Creatures have a hierarchy to their goals and motivations. Self-defense trumps hunger, hunger trumps sleep.

Demoing new product at work, then home!

I have some ideas for a basis for more advanced NPC AI. Need to mull on that a bit before gettings into details. I think certain aspects of the game are too mechanically simple right now, and I have been doing too much custom coding for each object.

Meetings all day, then holiday party. Struggling to stay hydrated, but it’s nice to see everyone from work.

Work, food, and bowling today. Did really well, which for me means no games below 100pts.

Vagrant/VirtualBox are very temperamental on Windows 10. Glad I havne’t upgraded from Windows 7 on my primary machine.

Spent the whole day traveling. Interesting moments:

• Loose dog on the airplane
• Airplane breaking before takeoff
• Discovering a completely gutted floor of the hotel while looking for an ice machine

Going on a business trip from Sunday through Wednesday, so I’m prepping for that. Will try to update as normal (which lately means small updates).