Hey Guys,
It’s been a while since my last post on the site, but it’s because we’ve been hard at work on People of Aionos! Enough progress has been made so that I can update this blog more often.
First off, I would like to share this jawbreaking background for the title screen of People of Aionos.
Wow. It shows the city of Inirion, the capital and biggest city on the remote world of Inir Fog. What was once a small mining city under Republic rule has grown into a full metropolis. The city can be separated into three distinct sections:
- The rich and influential citizens live in the Upper Rises, far above the dust storms that frequently hit this region of Inir Fog. Up on the mountain, the air is dry and warm, and people wander happily along its sky bridges, enjoying the promenades’ boutiques, restaurants and green areas.
- The heart of Inirion, and the source behind for its steady growth, is the Industrial Sector where the precious ores found in the surrounding mountains and canyons are transformed and shipped to every corner of the Empire. The Industrial Sector is relatively well protected from the dust, as it rests at the feet of the Inirion Mountain.
- Finally, the rest of the population lives at the base of the skyscrapers, in an area of Inirion that is often hit with dust storms: the Dust Pillars.
Secondly, the AI of People of Aionos has undergone a major overhaul since our last post. We used to have a behavior tree system that runs with RAIN AI and everything was running fine until I tried expanding the system for more complex behaviors. The behavior trees were getting huge, harder to maintain than necessary and some performance issues started to creep up when having multiple NPCs.
So I looked for an alternative and stumbled upon the Utility Theory that made making choices for an AI easy. Decision Flex has a great implementation of it for Unity. But once I had my AI’s choice made, I had to implement those behaviors and decided to code my own Behavior Manager for it. It acts like a State Machine, where the current state is decided by Decision Flex.
Unfortunately, using Decision Flex and dropping RAIN AI still left me without a pathfinding system to guide my NPCs around the map. So I turned to an alternative- that I had dismissed earlier because it used grids instead of navmeshes- Apex Path. Ever since I’ve been working with it, I have found Apex Path to be fast, reliable, easily customizable and it allows for easy Dynamic Avoidance, which I couldn’t get with RAIN AI.
Until next time where I will discuss the different ways of getting People of Aionos Pixel Perfect with multiple resolutions.
Cheers!