Monday, June 12, 2017

Josh: Forums Fires and So Forth

Adam: BSP Perfection

Sean: Continued Colony Work + Low-Level AI

I'm afraid that I'm going to be keeping this log briefer than any of us would like (no, I mean *actually* brief this time). If you're reading this, you no doubt have noticed the new forums. Talvieno and I worked over the past week to upgrade the forum software, which turned out to be hundreds of times more painful than expected. In the end, the greater part of my time was dedicated to forum-related things rather than LT code, so there's kind of a double-whammy situation going on here: on the one hand, I don't have much to talk about, on the other (same?) hand, I really don't want to spend more time not working on LT code---Already said it, pretty much. phpBB3.0 -> 3.2. Pain. Database migration. Pain. Old style did not support the new version (or vice-versa). Had to find new style that looked decent and close enough to our old one that it wouldn't shock and terrify everyone too badly (trust me, prosilver, the default theme, would shock and terrify you all; no one would touch the LT forums ever again). Pain, time. Time. Lots of time.LT-side, minimal stuff going on. ECS wrap-up delayed, but still feel good about it. Worked quite a bit at getting a very simple graphical API for Sean to use for simulations. Not much fun watching console output all day for simulations! Especially if you want to get into the low-level AI like dogfighting...and he does.Adam has officially perfected the robustness of our BSP trees. Like, to an insane degree. Floating-point precision has been told to shove off. Millions of rays being cast against complex shapes, perfect intersections being returned and never any false positives or negatives regardless of the input, etc. It's awesome. He's moving on to optimization now. This is the part where our narrow-phase physics tests become blindingly-fast!! I'm excited. If and when he's successful, we'll be looking at having more milliseconds than we know what to do withSean and I spent some time this week talking about how the 'low-level' AI systems work (i.e., the AI that executes specific actions that are directed by the high-level AI). He's very eager to get working on some of this stuff like combat maneuvering, obstacle avoidance, pathfinding, etc. Unfortunately, with things rather in-flux on the Lua side due to the migration to the new ECS, we don't have a great way to do 'simple' visualization tools that aren't in C (like the ones Adam is using for BSPs). That's not at all ideal, since Sean is working in Lua and we want to keep it that way. Thankfully, as of a few hours prior to writing this log, I've finished building a very simple visualization tool that will let him write visual simulations. I'm very excited to see what we can dig into come tomorrowI anticipate the coming week being an interesting one for AI!!---Apologies for the brevity, but time is in remarkably short supply at the moment while work is in remarkably high supply. Send us all your positive vibes for this week -- with luck we'll be nailing low-level gameplay systems, physics, and AI all at the same time!