Update 34: The AI is playing itself and the beginnings of a campaign.

Accomplishments this week:

AI: One of my next tasks was to apply the AI to both teams of the tactical game. While I wait for Unity 4.6's new UI to be released, using AI on both sides allows me to ignore the UI and refine the AI code. This also has the positive side-effect of preparing the AI to work better in multi-player games. This also includes selecting, targeting and dead (smoldering) tank animations. You can see these below.

Campaign: Moving next to the campaign, my goal was to create a very simple UI where:

• Time would pass
• Enemy encounters would be spawned
• The game would load the tactical level with the right players and enemies
• Auto resolve the battle with the AI
• Return back to the campaign, where the players would receive experience and abilities as they level up.

I had to fix a lot of bugs with the AI and camera to make this all work, including creating a new static game object, but it all works great.

What is next:

• Game Balance: The tactical game isn't currently very fair 
• Refining the character sheet: I need to add some new properties to the characters that I am now using
• Adding in the Campaign Diorama
• Adding objects to the tactical game
• Leveling up the tanks: Character progression is very important to this game

Update 33: More Refined Destruction

After refining the decay code, I went to work combining it with the destruction code. As I mentioned before, the idea was to dynamically explode my object and then use the decay to clean up the exploded blocks. This would double as a garbage collector and visually clean up the screen after the object had been destroyed. I also spent a lot of extra time making sure it would work with objects of different sizes and objects rotated. Subtle, but challenging to get right in all places. Below is a series of screenshots showing the current explosions and results. The biggest trouble I had was creating an object in the middle of my explosion with the right force. I'm very happy with the results here. You'll also notice in the during screenshots that 30% of my cubes are applied the same explosion texture as the center of the explosion. I found that this helped with performance and the explosion animation.

Square before:

Square during:

Square after:

Tank before:

Tank during:

Tank after:

Update 32: Decaying objects

I wrote a class today that I add to components I want to remove from the game (for example, my destructed walls). 

I add it to a gameobject like this: (where character is a gameObject)

            character.AddComponent<DynamicExplosionPiece>();

In the "Awake" method of this class, it randomly generates a number between 0 and 10, which is the number of seconds in the game before the object dies. What this means, is when I create 100 little objects for my destructed object, the game cleans them up after 10 seconds - at the most!. Because it's random, it has a decay effect. Here is a screenshot, of a recently dead enemy (red) tank. The turret has decayed, the cannon has not, and about 25% of the square body has decayed.

The actual class is here:

using UnityEngine;

using System.Collections;

public class DynamicExplosionPiece : MonoBehaviour

{

    void Awake()

    {

        StartCoroutine(StartTimerBeforeDestruction(Utility.GenerateRandomNumber(0, 10)));

    }

    private IEnumerator StartTimerBeforeDestruction(float time)

    {

        yield return StartCoroutine(Wait(time));

        Destroy(this.gameObject);

    }

    private IEnumerator Wait(float time)

    {

        yield return new WaitForSeconds(time);

    }

}

Update 31: Narrowing in on the game design: "Hovertank Wars"

Things are coming together nicely after an extended break from posting here.

I've had a positive look at the scope of my project and make a few changes to simplify what I'm trying to achieve. As a result, I've spent the last few months rewriting the design document and refactoring the code to create a new spin I am calling: "Hovertank Wars". Instead of soldiers, I will now have these hovertanks. Here is a screenshot of the test level I created to animate and test the new model:

I have a rotating tank, with pivoting turret and cannon. It fires explosive bullets:

I'm now refactoring the levels to use a new scale appropriate to these tanks as well as building a new campaign. 

Update 30: Line of Sight

I've managed to implement a simple line of sight mechanic with ray casting. If my character can't see an enemy - because they are behind another object and therefore, not in 'line of sight' of my character, I hide the mesh renderer on the object, effectively making it invisible. 

The great part about this solution is that the enemy character is still there and it's AI is still running. When the enemy character comes back into view again, I just enable the mesh renderer. Every time a character moves, I ray cast between each character and enemy to see if they are visible and then hide and show the enemy character depending on if they are in the line of sight of my player.

Here is a sample where I can't see the enemy (although, because I haven't yet replaced the UI of the enemy characters, you can see their health bars - this will be fixed later):

And here, after I move around the obstacle, I can see the enemy character again.

Update 29: Random Levels - Part 3

With the theory done and a solid prototype, it was time to implement the more advanced level creation into the main engine. I started by implementing the 6 tiles I needed, a vertical, horizontal, and the 4 turn pieces. I considered refactoring the pieces so that there were just two tiles and then rotate them to fit, but I realized it would be better to create the extra variation. Here is a screenshot all 12 tiles available now:

I moved my prototype code over to the main engine, replaced a few lines of code that were specific to the console app and generated my first dynamic level with a river.

With that working, I brought in the rest of the tiles (the previous screenshot was just river and a blank tile). The following two screenshots show two random maps with more of the pieces.

I can't begin to explain what a giant leap forward this is for me.

Update 28: Random Levels - Part 2

Happy with my new random levels, I quickly discovered that some of my map combinations didn't make much sense, especially when rivers or roads were involved. In the sample below, you can see two river tiles are connected with a tile with no river - it just doesn't look right.

To make better maps, I needed to a river/road to start on one edge and finish on the opposite edge. I started a prototype to solve the problem, migrating over a few level data structures from my game - fortunately my design and structures were generic enough to allow this. My initial plan was to take my level area, draw a continuous river/road across the level, and then fill in the blank tiles with random tiles. To work through this, I created a simple console application to output ASCII, using these tiles as samples:

╔0══╗╔1|═╗╔2══╗╔3|═╗╔4|═╗╔5══╗╔6══╗
║   ║║ | ║─────║ └────┘ ║──┐ ║║ ┌──
╚═══╝╚═|═╝╚═══╝╚═══╝╚═══╝╚═|═╝╚═|═╝

With the templates in place, I started work on the tiles. The first level, running my current level creation algorithm, looked like this, again highlighting how ridiculous this all looks:

Next, I went to work drawing the river first, and then filling in the remaining tiles. This wasn't too difficult, starting with a simple (3x3 level): 

...and scaled nicely, getting more complex quickly (8x8 level):

Finally, I adjusted the path-finding of the river, so that it wouldn't drop back on itself. Essentially, if I start from the left, let my river go up, down and right, but never backwards (left). The output looks like this:

This is exactly the result I was looking for. Additionally, it scales up easily, I ran some 100x100 samples in less than a second.  The next phase is to recreate these tiles in my game, the next post will be about this process. If you'd like to play with the prototype, I've posted the level creation tool online here.