[img]https://thumbs.gfycat.com/KindRegularAmericanshorthair-size_restricted.gif[/img] Welcome to the second part of the story of the AI system in The Riftbreaker. Without much ado, we will pick up right where we left off, and if you haven’t read the previous part, you can do so [url=https://steamcommunity.com/games/780310/announcements/detail/1615018332321236752]here[/url]. Everything we showed you up to this point was quite small in scale. That does not satisfy us. We want you to get that Starship Troopers feeling when you play The Riftbreaker - thousands of enemies attacking at a time. We set up this scenario to check how the creatures of various types will behave when they are spawned in their own spots all over the map. Red cubes represent flow fields that are pushing them away, which is very quick way to solve collision problems. They all have a common goal - destroy the human base. The groups will inevitably meet each other along the way - let’s see what happens. [img]https://thumbs.gfycat.com/MildGrimyKingfisher-size_restricted.gif[/img] Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/mildgrimykingfisher Even though the units are limited by the terrain obstacles in the forms of cliffs and pits, the groups manage to blend together and do not block each other’s way to the objective. When they reach a severe bottleneck, they still wiggle around, trying to position themselves to the best of their abilities. That is what will eventually make alien hordes become both terrifying an beautiful - simulating a group of living organisms, rather than robots, each waiting for their turn to cross the passage. Parallel to the development of the AI, other things happen in the studio. The first models of buildings take shape, the design of the world starts to take shape, more and more advanced elements are added. We can finally conduct tests on some real-life (real-game?) examples. We have set up a basic outpost with a couple of buildings (most of them do not even have textures yet). We also programmed the behavior and attacks for each of the enemies, and basic particle effects were added to symbolize their attacks. Bye, bye, colorful debug cubes! We let a couple of units of each type wreak havoc on the base. Can you guess which enemy types from The Riftbreaker each of them symbolizes? [img]https://thumbs.gfycat.com/FarflungSlightArabianhorse-size_restricted.gif[/img] Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/farflungslightarabianhorse Even so that everything was working pretty well. There was one thing missing. How to get to the fancy level of Starcraft-like unit movement? Everything moves so smooth and fast in that game, with no movement delay. Well, we tried many things. Praying, watching TV, reading comic books. And guess what, that didn't help us a lot :( But one day our programmer found a solution when he was playing with his young son. They put small balls in a bucket and shook them. Every time, the balls were filling all the empty gaps in the bucket. What magic force was doing that? The answer was - THE GRAVITY. By combining a unique force of gravity for each creature with its very simple soft body simulation, we finally received something similar to Starcraft. With proper looks and animations added, this resembles a game all of a sudden! [img]https://thumbs.gfycat.com/MaleUncommonAegeancat-size_restricted.gif[/img] Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/maleuncommonaegeancat We mentioned earlier that it is important for us to make the creatures behave in a believable manner. The last thing we would want our players to see is a bunch of rabid space dogs standing in the field and doing nothing, simply because they currently cannot find a way to reach their target. That is not rabid enough for us. Instead, the creatures group around the target, filling the gaps and behaving like they are controlled by a hive mind. There is only one target, you must reach it by any means necessary. This looks like a living cell, to be honest! [img]https://thumbs.gfycat.com/VigilantFoolishKiskadee-size_restricted.gif[/img] Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/vigilantfoolishkiskadee Finally, it is time to roll out the heavy artillery. The year of developing complex systems and algorithms, thousands of lines of code, countless cups of coffee later, we let thousands of units loose. No more words, let the images speak for themselves. [img]https://thumbs.gfycat.com/OccasionalSoftHedgehog-size_restricted.gif[/img] Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/occasionalsofthedgehog Did we manage to capture that Starship Troopers feeling? What other aspects of game development would you like to read about? Let us know in the comments and on our Discord server! www.discord.gg/exorstudios We have a lot of new and exciting things coming your way and we can’t wait to show them off! Other social media: www.facebook.com/exorstudios www.twitter.com/exorstudios www.mixer.com/exor_studios www.twitch.tv/exorstudios