Relee Squirrel

12:24pm - Despite it being Victoria Day, a traditional vacation day in Canada, I felt like working, so I'm down at the McDonalds again. I guess I'll pay myself double time and a half today. XD

So after studying all that AI stuff and Utility AI in particular, I want to make some kind of demo for my portfolio, to demonstrate my mastery of these subjects.

I thought about it and I decided that I would make a simple game of Tag. It'll have the basic steering behaviors of seek, chase, and flee, and I'll manage them using a Utility AI implementation. I'll be doing it in 3D with the Unity NavMesh system, and I'll mix things up by giving the players different running and turning speeds, a stamina meter and the ability to sprint. As a rule to keep things moving, there'll be no tagbacks. The characters will be blue, except for the character who is 'it' who will be red. The previous person who was it will be green. I also want to include a 'debug' switch that shows the sensors for all the characters.

1:03pm - So, let's break this into tasks.

Create a 3D playground for the game to take place in.

Set up the NavMesh.

Create the tag characters.

Set up the Utility-AI implementation so that it's ready to start calling actions.

Develop the gameplay actions for the tag characters.


That'll give me a good start.

I also decided to update Unity while I'm out here, before I begin. That's running in the background right now, and it says it's got about four minutes left, so while I wait for that I'll research the NavMesh a little more.

1:35pm - The Unity update is taking longer than I expected. I probably should've updated it at home, but here I am. Anyways I've gone through the NavMesh tutorials to refresh myself on how NavMesh works in Unity, and now I'm just waiting for Unity to finish downloading again. The segment that was four minutes was actually just a smaller part of the whole, and the whole doesn't seem to be even half way done yet, so I might have a while to wait.

2:36pm - Finally got Unity down and installed. Looks like they changed the default skybox. It's kind of smoggy looking now. I'm not sure I like it. Alas.

2:48pm - Ahh, my mistake, it's just that they nolonger automatically put a camera and light in the scene for whatever reason.

4:10pm - Oh geez I lost track of the time, I should've taken a break by now. I'll do that now. I just put a concrete texture on the playground and it's easier to see what/where everything is. It's a little dark, but I can deal with it.

5:53pm - Well I've finished my break and I've finished the playground for my game of tag. It's got a navmesh. Next step is to make the characters.

6:07pm - I have a simple capsule character for now.

6:29pm - I realized I wouldn't know what direction they were facing so I put a simple body inside the capsule and made the capsule invisible. Next I'm going to test the NavMesh with a simple script, before I start putting the Utility-AI code in.

6:46pm - Okay the navmesh works. I had my little dude wander around and go up one of the ramps in the scene.

Next I need to get the Utility-AI set up. But for now I'm feeling spacey and bored with my work, so I'm going to pack up and go home, maybe play with Rob.