Pathing

I've now built up a way to implement simple pathing to anything I choose to spawn from the editor. For now, it's just a series of points that the object will follow in order. They'll either follow it to the end, then start over from the beginning, or follow to the end, and then reverse their course along the points. I plan on expanding on this in the future to allow pauses at specific points, maybe choosing which direction the object should face once paused or a variety of other actions that may take place at those points. In addition, I think I'll add a way to have just general roam areas that the object will wander around in randomly rather than a strict point to point type movement.

Retention

The game now supports the ability to store and recall what was in the previous area. This is obviously very important and basic, but yea. I've got it set up and functioning swimmingly. This stored data could also be used in the future for save files. I think the system is robust enough that if I want, I could go ahead and use it for saving at any point the player wishes. . . I doubt I'd allow that, but the option is there. In any case, all objects will now store and restore correctly. In addition to this, I've implemented a way for those objects to know how long a period of time the player was absent for. What can be done with such information you ask? Well, for starters, I can change their alert status from active to inactive so that if the player was gone for a long enough time, they'll just go back to doing what they were doing prior to chasing the player around. I'm also toying with the idea of having mobs be able to follow the player from one area to the next. It's not hard to do. . . at least, it's not too complicated, but I'm not sure just yet it's something I want. We'll see.

Grouped AI

Another thing I threw in is that enemies will now react to other enemies in their direct vicinity attacking the player. So you can't say hit one, and have only that one know what's up with joe blow right next to him is oblivious. Right now, it's super simple so they'll just also join in on attacking the player but I can flesh it out further once I get down to the nitty gritty.

Loading

It took some doing, but I put in a loading screen. On the PC which is where I'm capturing this stuff, it doesn't seem to take any time at all to load, but on the 360, I'd say in between those two levels, the load is around 4 or 5 seconds. I'm figuring with more art, sounds, and full sized areas, it'll be considerably more. I figured out how to break off a thread so that the loading screen can have stuff going on (animations and whatnot) to show that something is still happening to the player as the bulk of the system is loading up the next area. I also added a fade to black and fade back in between level loads to keep it from being too jarring. Again, this is all place holder and I plan on making something a little more interesting later on, but the foundations are now there so hurray for that.

What Else?

Aside from those, I've made a lot of smaller changes here and there to various systems so that everything works together nicely. A lot of clean up and optimization. I put a little more time into the way the camera handles as well. . . There was a crazy bug with the camera that I tracked down over an hour. The fix took literally 5 seconds. . . But oh man, finding it was sweet.