To our goat overlords

So I opened Pandoras jar. Yesterday was quite productive and I am pretty pleased with it. I started working on a new AI system, based on Unitys animator component and the theory I found at the likes of Tommy Thompson who has a compulsory YouTube  channel on AI in games. It took a little rewriting,  but it looks really workable. Someone on Twitter already greeted our new AI goat overlords when I shared this one.

This one is as complex as it looks really. A goat enters the game in a WalkAround state where after a time a trigger "arrived" is hit. When that happens, the goat will go to the NextTarget state. It then immediately returns to WalkAround. If, after some time, a trigger "died" is hit, the state will transition to Dead.

Now that I'm typing this, I see a flaw. It works, but only for randomly walking around. That is because I use the behaviour scripts for this state machine. NextTarget does not actually anything but having the WalkAround state restart. Picking the destination for walking is done in WalkAround,  making it useless for any agent that does not walk around randomly.

What I'm going to do tonight is move that destination deciding thing to NextTarget and rename both states to be used for other agents.  The Walk state will deal with a destination in the Unit object and walk there. When it arrives,  the next state will decide where to go next or what to do next. A worker might want to collect food after moving to the bushes, a goat will go somewhere else. Both could use the Walk state for walking. The difference is in the transition after that.

Anyway... I also did a little thing to trigger the "died" thing. For that, I added health to objects. When health gets to zero or below, it hits the "died" trigger.  Objects then change to other objects. For instance, when a tree dies of cutting, it turns into a horizontal thing that gives wood supplies. It gets different attributes by dying. Technically it's become a different object,  but ssssht, don't tell anyone.

Next steps will be to first fix the issue with the states, to add a healthbar and damaging mechanism to test the death thing and then to start Worker AI. With AI here I mean the intelligence to perform orders like "go there" and "harvest that". Giving the orders by enemy players is for much later. I call that Player AI and I did not give that much thought yet. Did I forget to mention anything? Probably, but the bus hits the "arrived" trigger, so I sign out for now.