brainwipe's blog

After my previous attempt at getting bad guys to move around, I hit YouTube hard in my lunch breaks and discovered that lots of people repurpose the inbuilt animator finite state machine for doing most AI.

SMELLY

This is a code smell. Every domain object and class should do one job and do it well. Repurposing suggests that you're bending a system for something that it wasn't intended for (single responsibility principle). However, I thought it was best to just get over myself, give it a go and then come back again later.

The next step in Cloudship is adding bad guys that will follow eventually hunt and kill the player. I know that I'm going to create a finite state machine eventually where the enemy will sit at various states and move from one to the next given certain times. The machine will be made up of rules like this ([name] rule):

I'm charging toward the more difficult things first and creating a procedurally generated weather map was definitely a big task. I wanted to use a Perlin noise map rather than circle packing algorithms because I wanted there to be dead spaces where you can stop, recoup and not drift off. I might stick in a global wind to gently push you.

Preamble

I'm holidaying at home this week; spending lots of time with Kate and Naomi (Felix is in Folkestone with his Grandparents). There are snatches of downtime (like now) where Naomi is off to sleep, it's a bit early for lunch and Kate is pinned down. There's not enough time to get out to a field to fly the quads but there is enough time to bimble on the computer.

My co-worker is off sick (how sick? He's in bed with his sister! HAW HAW) so I threw caution to the wind and set about dismantling the somewhat sad Glass Mountain. Two farm towers (melon and pumpkin) are thrust up through it and as it is dwarfed by all around it and since I tidied up that area, it's looks somewhat sad.

Astroneer last night was fun but hitting crash bugs over and over was so very annoying. Big R understandably "fatigue-quitted" over them. We decided to do less land-training and more deep-cave diving for research, and we found it was stable. We got battery research, EMW managed to make a Moon base using the ship as a starting point and I became a ferry pilot to move resources from Terran to the Moon. I got a crash report now and again but it was certainly more fun. [Big R - I found the land train and your stuff and returned it safely to base].

This could be a mantra. I find myself progressively more interested in building stuff but I don't have time to do it. So, what I'm going to do is just list them here, to get them out of my head. I'll add more into the comments as I remember them.

There's a place I call Evil Gorge, sandwiched between The Evil Mansion and the Enchanter's Tower. To the South is Disco and to the north is the glass mountain. It's such a cool (natural) place but has been ruined by Endermen over the years. It's also ruined by lag thanks to the up-draft of the melon farm. I decided to take the plunge during my lighting mission to tidy it up.

You can see some grass still propagating. The glass mountain is rather sad with the farms pushing through it. I'm tempted to take it down and give the farms some medieval shells.

YAY! This is a great update for me.

First of all the colour palette of MC has been a bit naff for some time. Yellow wool has been a sort of sick colour. Well they've sorted that out, added patterned glazed terracotta (renamed from hardened clay) blocks and concrete (which acts like sand until it comes into contact with water). Beds can also be coloured now. YAY!

Mission

To light everywhere inside the Ringwall.

Progress

Everything covered in a white glow has been lit.

Lighting an area follows this kind of process: