Sporedum collected a few more interviews from the various attendees who attended the Spore Galactic Adventures creator’s camp. Drop by to check out the three newly posted Q&A’s!
Sporedum: What was the complexity in the AI and goal settings like?
G3NJI: This question is a little hard for me to answer as I did not dive too deep into this stuff. Some of the other creators did a bit and pulled off some great scenes. You can set up enemies so that they have certain actions as soon as they see you, like scream something or immediately start attacking you. I had it set up in my mission so that I would have an almost continuous battle going on between some allies and enemies.
I set the enemies and allies to similar settings, aggressive, with a modest awareness radius and fast respawn times. You could jump in to the fight and help or just completely by pass them. I had other enemies later in the mission set to ignore me in the first act but then as soon as I kill one of their comrades and finish that act…..they would then start to attack me. Unfortunately that was about as deep as I got into it, I just needed more time.
I seen in other creators missions were they would walk up to a creature and click on them, they would then goto a cut scene of the creature talking with all different kinds of emotes and what not. After you finished talking to them, you go do their task they asked of you and then return. It was really great, it was no different than a quest ripped from any other game, except that…..you made it which makes it that much more fun.
Sporedum: We know from the interview that you can set paths for vehicles, how does this work and can you do this for sea vehicles to?
Ceece: When you place an object in to your world, you can open up an action menu (I don’t remember the exact name) and one of the things you can assign is how you want your creature or object to more. So in this case you would chose either patrol or set path. Once this is picked you then see a little blue line with a arrow at the end of it coming out of your object, you just place your arrow where you want your object to go. Patrol makes it go back and forth along that path, and set path just makes it move to were you put the arrow. I did not try it out on a sea vehicle, but I would imagine that it would work the same.
By the way, I really liked GA, I felt like I needed a lot more time with it though, he he, it has an amazing amount of stuff you can do with it.
Sporedum: What was the complexity in the AI?
Dananddna: Like they said before, there are three basic layers of complexity for AI. First a creatures starts off with a parts based behavior, then you can give it a general AI (friendly, neutral, aggressive) or a team, then finally you can add conditions to the AI. I didn’t get to dive too far into the AI, but play around with programming one creature to follow another NPC. Also, I found a way of making a creature “emote” when approached by the character (it was a bug-like creature, and whenever you walked up to it, it would emote the scared animation)
Sporedum Exclusive: Adventure Camp interview with Ceece and Dananddna