August progress

I had planned on working on sex animations, but ended up not touching them at all. Instead I put all my efforts on the gameplay side. As I have had major changes planned there for a while, it all is a really slow process of refactoring most of the code I have. 

I basically decided to start using more add-ons which handle certain parts of the project for me. 2 years ago I was way more against add-ons, but now it's clear that some of these add-ons exist for a good reason. For example, instead building up my own AI system, how it's controlled and so on, I use a tool which handles most of the really technical side, allowing me to just make a few modules and then get more creative about how I combine the different AI elements. 

Other thing I wanted to swap out is the grid system. Since the beginning I wanted it to be simple and light-weight. By now it feels like most systems rely on the grid in some undesired ways. And my own made movement logic isn't even that nice. Players don't have an option to move many tiles at once, even if the character has points for it. The AI also only looks at the path forward one tile at a time basically. 

I decided to start using a really good ready made pathfinding solution, that also doubles as a grid system. And well, it has built in hex grid solution too. At the beginning of the project I decided against hex grid, as it would have been more difficult to implement, but now that it's ready made, I feel like I want to move over. Square grid solutions have the issue, where diagonal movements are weird. Distance calculations get uneven, depending on how you count these diagonal movements. Hex grids don't have that problem, as movement in every direction is the same distance. 

While making this move, I also feel like I want to detach most combat abilities from the grid and make them actually use world space. For example when throwing a grenade, you won't anymore see highlight of which hexes are hit, but instead a sphere that indicates what is hit. I'm not 100% sure on all that though. I'm just worried that checking everything against the grid slows the progress of developing interesting abilities, like it has been blocking me this far. 

Anyways, all the idea talk to the side, I actually have gotten the grid logic mostly working. It's just that now I have to detach all the other parts from the grid logic too and either attach them to the new code or keep them independent. 

Oh and I also made a quick render yesterday as I felt like it. I've seen many people make similar images with different characters recently.