Transitions are important

Working with and getting used to Unitys Animator, I find that the beef of these state machines is in the transitions between the states. Different states have the agent do different things, but the main thing is to get the agent to go to a specific state when you want it to.

I'm working on the gather mechanics for workers.  I put a little rock from Blender in my scene, added a resource script and focussed on the interaction between worker and rock (and explaining to a friend that not all interaction is sexual).

In short, you right click on the rock and the worker will move towards it. When it's there, it'll make a difference if the agent really is a worker and not, say, a catapult. Catapults can't gather resources in Holocene. Workers can. I managed that by adding a task enum to the unit script. That enum contains certain things that only certain units can do, like gather. The worker script will override the unit script for moving to a resource, adding the gather task. Now that is used to trigger gathering.  Guys without the task will go idle on arrival.  Others will go to the gather state.

Then gathering happens.  The worker will get resources over time and the rock will loose some. Then we need to decide what to do next.  When the rock is 'empty' or the worker can't hold any more resources,  we need to drop it to a building.

I've not finished this yet,  but I will save the resource object and location in a separate variable and find a suitable drop off point and object to go there, setting the task to return. The walking behaviour takes the worker to the drop off point and triggers the dropping.  Next the resource will be the target again and the worker returns to gathering. When the wotker does not have any resources and the rock is empty too, he's finished and will look for another rock to carve.

This should be the gathering AI. It took my some time to think up, especially since I need to get used to the triggers in animators. I am at a point though where I think I know what to do next.

This is one of those things I love about making games. There's little victories around every corner,  much more than in my day job. That's very motivating.