News Liste Exanima
Insider testing has been ongoing for most of the month, which went surprisingly smooth for a first round of testing after so much development down time. We've patched the test build a few times now, but many of the issues being reported were older things we've been catching up on and we've spent most of the time making improvements rather than bug fixing.
We've only added a few fundamental roles and a little dialogue so far to test the core functionality, we did run into some tricky issues, but everything seems to be running smooth now. We should be able to focus on adding more role based behaviours and dialogue now that the foundation is solid. We've been getting a lot of useful feedback and suggestions from testers, and had some in-depth discussions. We're still figuring out what the right balance is for NPCs being talkative and reactive and we'll be experimenting with things over time.
Core AI received a lot of fundamental changes in terms of emotions, personality etc. with the goals of making personality more important, providing some more rational behaviour even without role involvement and supporting better interaction with roles. For now we've mostly been trying to get things balanced out and working again, though during testing we did expand quite a lot on some core behaviours and reactivity and how these work together with various activities. NPCs must now juggle many things, like for example following someone, searching the environment, looting, noticing interesting things, keeping an eye on potential threats and conducting a dialogue all at the same time. Tricky stuff, and no doubt we'll keep tweaking and improving core AI and these sort of things, but we seem to have everything in a pretty good functional spot already.
Looting behaviour was another big focus in testing. Derrin as our test case for these new features, now moves around the environment independently searching objects, containers and bodies, calling out items he thinks the player might find useful and looting and equipping himself independently. There's a lot of nuance to choosing which items are worth taking or holding on to as well as coordinating this more independent behaviour. We've made some pretty big improvements and adjustments during testing, mostly trying to make this as smooth and practical as possible. Making AI as capable of interacting with the world as a player is a big part of our vision, but we do also see this as an important gameplay and quality of life feature. We'll definitely keep expanding on and tweaking this, but it's quite functional already. Testers have noted that seeing Derrin move around and engage and interact with the environment instead of just standing there is very impactful and really brings him to life.
A while back we developed a new pathfinding system for dealing with dynamic paths involving physics objects, multiple layers, vertical clearance and potentially more modes of movement, and we've now made some more improvements. The system is complex and has not been free of some issues since we introduced it. During testing we particularly found it's not great to have smart and talkative NPCs if they then just walk into a pit while carrying all your loot, or get stuck in silly ways. We did a deep dive into the pathfinding system, to make AI take less unnecessary risks, not get stuck and a few other solid improvements. We've identified a few more things we can improve, but already things are in a much better state. Exanima is a complex game at a very fundamental level, and this has obvious advantages, but we're well aware that it can also lead to some tedium and annoyance. Now that we've developed our core tech to this extent, we see ourselves focusing more on making a smoother and more enjoyable experience and quality of life in general.
This update also includes a significant overhaul of our apparel system to solve many issues with clipping and animation and massively streamline our workflow, as well as some performance and other benefits. Just about every item in the game had to be reconfigured for it and often adjusted in some way if not completely reworked. Inevitably there were some things to fix up and here there, but we're all caught on any clipping and similar issues reported so far. Things are looking very good on this front.
There were some notable graphical improvements in this update too, with some new tech for ground displacement, detail shadows, lighting and shadows in general and many asset improvements too. We've had testers often express how impressed they've been with the graphical updates and how good the game looks now. We're always aware of things we can do to make the game look even better, but we try to avoid working on graphics tech as there's so much else to do and we want to keep the game potato friendly. These were relatively low investments and scalable upgrades with a big return and we're very glad we did them.
Finally, as we're very close to public testing we'd like to briefly introduce the role system, what it's supposed to do and what to expect from it, as there are clearly still many misconceptions. This is also important to clarify what we hope to gain from testing and what kind of feedback we'd like to see.
What the role system is not, is a specific set of AI features and capabilities. This is a very important distinction from other AI systems you may be comparing it to. Such a "one and done" system would not be enough to do what we want from it. We're all about delivering that quality hand crafted experience. We do not want dynamic, but ultimately shallow NPCs. The role system is essentially a content tool, a narrative tool. Roles are very broad in their scope, they can provide unique behaviours and dialogue for specific characters, or they can, as the term "role" suggests, be adopted by any character. Characters can have many roles at once and know each other by various roles, these roles change dynamically. Every role provides new interactions, and these can lead to more roles with more interactions and so on. This means that as we build our library of roles, we create more and more emergent behaviours. So in a sense, it is a collection of AI capabilities, one that we can keep expanding on, but above all else it is a dynamic story telling tool.
This means that just because we added the system, you won't suddenly see the undead taking up new professions and starting book clubs. While that is entirely within the realm of the system, our aim for now is to very carefully craft what we would call "foundational roles". These would be the roles describing the most common behaviours, activities and relationships, that other roles can then build on, specialise on, or add to. Our first goal is to make NPC companions that feel as close as possible to human players. This is particularly difficult, it involves some intricate roles and mechanics. We want to gather feedback and ideas and learn everything we can from this particularly complex and important case before designing many more roles.
You should hopefully get an idea of the direction of this with your first experiences of it, but basically keep in mind that our intent for now is to build on these fundamental aspects and make them really good, not to add a bunch of fluff and drown out the essence of it with noise. Ideally your feedback would reflect this, and you will be critical of the foundations before asking about the colour of the wallpaper. Tell us how you wish the AI had reacted during moments of gameplay, without focusing too much on the specifics. Also bear in mind that part of our vision is non player centric design. A player will inevitably do things an NPC will not, but they are just another character with their own set of roles. The AI is incapable of distinguishing between player and non player characters, so think of roles and interactions as always interchangeable.
Since testing began we've mostly been working on things and making some additions that we didn't really expect to, but now we're back on track. We're working on introducing one last role based interaction and reviewing some dialogue now so we expect public testing to begin soon. A big thank you to the testers who have been very thorough and patient and have been giving us great feedback.
Best,
Bare Mettle
Release:29.04.2015
Genre:
Action-Rollenspiel
Entwickler:
Bare Mettle Entertainment
Vertrieb:
Bare Mettle Entertainment
Engine:keine Infos
Kopierschutz:keine Infos
Franchise:keine Infos
Einzelspieler
Mehrspieler
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