Living Shuttles and AI Beginning

Living Shuttles

Author: Salireths

This month I've worked on many assorted things, ships, technology, gameplay, main game-area/vessel concepts... Which I've spent whole 15 days just trying to find what I need, thrown away countless ideas, scribbled dozens of sketches - all to find just one worthy concept...

I keep wondering, why is sci-fi so hard to do? If I were to make some generic fantasy castles and villages it would be so much easier and faster.
But well, I haven't gone this far producing original never-seen-before things just to abandon it all for some dull bricks that can be found on Unreal Engine Marketplace!
I just sincerely hope you all appreciate the world I'm creating, this is really hard work.

While I don't have much to show you of the main area/vessel just at this moment (it's still unfinished), I have prepared a presentation of the primary transportation way, after all, you've got to get down to these platforms somehow, not everyone has wings of their own!

So it all began with an inspiration, I stumbled upon this art and I couldn't get it out of my head. The perfect blend of machine and a creature - it resonated with my long-time desire to design a living aircraft. Also they look sexy as hell for me, but it might just be me.

While I'm nowhere near the skill level @_MechMonster has, I still gave it my honest try to design a living ship.

A couple dozen sketches and a few days later, I had something I was confident in - while at first I planned it to be the main ship spanning kilometers, I scaled him down and turned him into a smaller shuttle-craft capable of transporting only player and their party.

It seems more important for this sleek boy to be smaller also - our game is not about fleet management, but about "away missions" where you get to interact with creatures first-hand. Plus it would be great to eventually give players an optional ability to romance their own shuttle, turning work-partner relationship into lovers of different species and physiologies :}

There is a lot of possibilities where the shuttle idea can be expanded in the future which I don't want to speculate about yet, for now we'll need to focus on the most functional aspect of them - bringing players into the realities/platforms and back home.

🔶🔷 Full resolution + nsfw version is in the attachments below! 🔷🔶

NPC object recognition and follow behaviour

Author: Hopfel

For NPCs to interact with their surroundings they need to perceive it. One of the main tools commonly used in games is the navigation mesh. While we might still use that technique for path finding in the future, dynamic object recognition allows NPCs to react to static and moving obstacles outside of the predefined navmesh (such as other players or dynamically placed object).

For this, all NPCs shoot raycasts in given intervals and reconstruct sampled points into bounding boxes using principal component analysis.

Thanks to this technique, 4 raycasts per second are enough to give the NPC an idea over what their surroundings look like without having to make assumptions about the primitives (concave mesh/terrain/etc).

The NPC builds a continuous surface from samples, this allows them to guess the size of the surface in front of them.

All samples are stored relative to the owning object and thus support moving objects. Detected objects are used for collision avoidance.

NPCs go out of the way if you’re about to run into them.

Since e.g. walls are stored as big continuous objects even big obstacles can be avoided:

Finally, the follow behaviour makes NPC walk towards a circle around their target which allows for formations (compared to just walking towards the target itself).

For next month we plan on using a behaviour tree to work on first proper NPC interactions and combat crucial for gameplay.

I’ve made a little writeup of the math used for the collision avoidance, for whomever is interested in this:

-----------

Thank you for reading!