Hey, look over there — a shiny!
Crowfall Principal Programmer Chris Ledwith, the newly dubbed “AI Guy,” explains in a dev blog today that the shinies of Crowfall’s Big World development have distracted the team away from AI — and now he’s on a mission to rectify that.
“The problem that we faced was that the code was in dire need of an update to make everyone’s prior work on the AI shine,” Ledwith writes. “The code was originally written for simpler, relatively flat maps, with no dynamic placement of buildings or props, in a very static world; it made a lot of convenient assumptions about the environmental conditions an AI could find itself in. This system was written pre-Big World, with Band-Aids applied over time in an attempt to keep it ‘just good enough’ in lieu of spending too much time away from more immediately pressing work. Finally, we decided that we had to turn it off for at least a couple of core reasons: behavior and performance were not up to par.”
Wait, don’t get distracted by shinies again! Ledwith gives a couple of examples of beasts whose pathing needed work before laying out his grand plans for parcels, building placement, and baby gates for mobs. Take a peek at the whole outline on the official site.
