PANPC 2.1 and PAST - Dev Diary #1
So I'm happy to report that significant progress is being made on PANPC 2.1. I hope to get a first dev version to my test team today, and a dev diary video done sometime in the next few days.
First priority for 2.1 is backporting whatever I can from PAST, the Starfield Pack Attack prototype that I abandoned work on last year. Starfield was a quagmire for me (and a lot of others): a new Bethesda game platform that we all expected to go places, but instead got delivered as a crudely cobbled-together hulk that never really had a chance. By the time I finally pulled the plug on my Starfield work, I was badly burned out and deeply frustrated with the whole fiasco.
I wasn't sure how much of the PAST changes could be backported to Fallout 4. This was one area where Starfield's lack of innovation under the hood bore fruit, because it turned out that most of the PAST improvements could be made to PANPC.
These include:
Completely overhauled debug logging system. This may not sound sexy, but it was the heart of PAST and will be the heart of PANPC 2.1. Accurate logging means I have a lot more visibility in what's happening in the code, and I can identify and fix bugs and inefficiencies much more quickly. This is a big deal for PANPC.
NPC cover detection. I'm very excited about this one. In PAST, the AI could detect whether or not an NPC was in cover, and make their own decisions appropriately. I wasn't sure the same technique could be done in Fallout 4, but have recently verified that it can. So expect AI tactics to take that into consideration in 2.1.
New evasion-related state machines. Evasion is incredibly important in PANPC, and various Starfield factors (map designs, etc.) made it even more important in PAST. The new evasion routines I developed for Starfield are now in PANPC 2.1.
Upgraded movement system core. The movement control system (GoThere) in PANPC 2.1 has been updated to the PAST version. Among other things, the upgrade includes fully integrated post-move actions such as attacking and activating. In PANPC 2.0 these actions were executed in a followup cycle that could take a few seconds following a move completion.
That's just a small handful of the changes coming to 2.1.
They will represent significant changes to how the AI behaviors work, which comes at a price: all the NPCs will need their behaviors reimagined and retooled. That will take some time and a lot of testing to get right. So expect the final 2.1 release to represent the same scale of redesign that 2.0 was over 1.8 and 1.9.
I don't currently have a hard ETA on a final release. There's still a lot of work to do, and I'm not going to ship until I'm comfortable with where we are. But stay tuned for more news, including some dev diary and test videos sometime soon.
G.