Posts Tagged ‘nav mesh’

Hey all! Not much to talk about, but basically a review of what I and the team been doing over the past few days:

Server-side bots

If you’ve ever played Counter-Strike: Source, then you will surely know about server-side bots. These bots are surprisingly good and fun to play with, however this is not the reason we decided to implement them in Axel. As our team lives around the world and none of us have particularily good upload speeds, it’s quite hard to test multiplayer with someone with a ping <100ms. Therefore Pat asked for a test bot framework, “for testing out the engine and net code as well as dm/coop”.

As I know there is bot code in the Source SDK, I took a shot at copy and pasting the bot files over from the EP1 SDK. After a couple of hours fiddling with file includes and changing some functions around, I got the code to compile. However in the game the bots would not move. At all. As I hate copy and pasting code, I decided to scrap that idea and make my own, using the SDK bot as inspiration. If you’ve  been following the blog, you should have noticed the link I put to the bot images directory several days ago. This contained screenshots of some very basic (and bad) bots in a square map. The bot:

• If further than x units away from the target player:

Look at the player’s origin

Simulate pressing “forward”

• If within x units to the player:

Move backwards

However the bot had a huge flaw: the player must be in the line of sight of the bot. The bot could, however, climb over objects.

Not being content with the results, I decided to implement the navigation mesh system available in the Episode 1 SDK. I showed a screenshot of the working navigation mesh editor on the blog, too. This was a huge result for me and had taken several grueling hours of porting over EP1 functions and classes, however it paid off. This meant I could now set to work on pathfinding, which I completed today. Take a look at the bot navigating towards me:

Pathfinding

Although the bot’s pathfinding isn’t perfect, it’s very ‘fixable’.

Alex is back!

After being away for several months (bad internet connection), Alex AKA G0rdan is back on the team. He immediately set to work on bringing proper animations to HL2DM. Hopefully, HL2DM animations will soon look like this (except with proper weapon detection):

Counter-Strike: Source animations

Upcoming code review

If you’ve ever been part of any mod/project team involving coding, you’ll notice that you get off track and start implementing features while the bugs mount up. YNH decided that enough was enough and we’re going to start a code review. In the bug tracker, there are currently six Immediate urgency issues, and four Urgent. These are the “show stopper” bugs that are delaying release. The majority of these bugs can be easily fixed if all of the team’s programmers put their mind to it… so wish us luck!

Conclusion

For once I’ve managed to wrap up everything the team has been up to in the past week, and I’m hoping to make the “Dev update” blog posts more ritual. Therefore dev updates will now be every Sunday (instead of just randomly). This will hopefully allow me to cover everything, plus I’m usually free on Sundays. Peace out.

Navigation mesh

Stay tuned for more!