Thank you so much, all of you. Its incredibly encouraging, especially since this project is hidden to almost everyone I know, because it started as a little side project.
There is so much work going into this, I'm actually very shocked thinking about every little piece that constitutes the whole. I take for granted what I've started in the beginning of this project, and realize that isolating every peice and getting it working is what lets me make the game seem complicated as a whole. From George Pirvu's excellent pathfinding tutorial, where I understood the fundamentals of A*, to little scripts I made just for fun, creating a dynamic list of allies for each AI, bone rotation and limits, then onto my first state based AI. Every tiny script and function is working together....
-BACK ON TRACK-
Here is a small update. As stated before I am integrating non vehicular models into Tomorrow Armor, so that you can control on-foot troops and other characters.
Script-wise its all about setting lists of variables, and assigning them to the AI/Player when the level loads. Human models have flags in their script that will constraint their torso bone from rotating 360, other variables control how fast they run, others resize the collision hull to my tuning. Soon I'll be adding things like bullet impacts on humans will squirt blood, vehicles will burst into flames on death and etc.
Its all about setting up a predefined list for characters, then plugging in the values during script.
After I infused Keith with life, he asked me for a 1 on 1 deathmatch in the test level. The conversation went like this:
Keith Bot: HAY JUSTIN! You want to play challenge of deathmatch? Justin: Sure....but I know exactly what your going to do. Keith Bot: NO! Your not as am smart as me am!!!!!one.
And on a slight AI tangent not seen in the video, I've added an ability for Keith to backflip, which opens up a new set of abilities for every AI. Right now I forsee the AI characters backflipping, doing combat rolls, doing melee attacks...
