Pre-Alpha 1.023 and 1.024

Hi, sorry for the relatively long time between updates. We’ve been quite busy distributing rewards, and re-writing low level systems in the game to make it easier to expand in the future. In this latest update to the prototype, we completely re-wrote most of the AI system yet again. Its a bit sad, since one of the core parts of the engine at the outset was a symbolic action planner, but that turned out to be too hard to maintain. So we refactored everything, and now use Behavior Trees instead. Tasks are still assigned to dwarves with a centralized optimizer. Dwarves’ individual behaviors are now hand-coded rather than being planned using the symbolic action planner. This is much, much simpler and easier to debug.

We also added some new dwarf artwork, and fixed a few crashes and performance issues.

Additionally, we’ve been exploring tool development, modding, and porting options, but haven’t made enough progress on these fronts to push out an update on them.

If you want to try it, just go to the “DOWNLOAD” button above.

1.024

• – Added programmer config parameter to turn on or off behavior tree debugger.
• – By default, behavior tree viewer is now off in config file.

1.023

• – Completely re-wrote AI to use coroutines + Behavior Trees rather than GOAP + state machine
• – Wrote a behavior tree viewer
• – Pressing “Map” while on flatland no longer crashes
• – Player starts facing north instead of south
• – Fixed some issues with stockpiles not clearing state when objects removed
• – Dwarves put away items when they can’t build using them.
• – If a dwarf can’t gather an item, he now simply throws it to the ground in anger
• – Dwarves guard voxels until guard designations are removed (unfortunately they don’t attack enemies while guarding yet)
• – Improved performance of dwarves’ enemy sensors
• – Misc performance improvements with drawing
• – World Generator starts with random seed.
• – Start and generate buttons flipped in world generator
• – Reserved keys can no longer be set (arrow keys, alt, ctrl, etc) by user.
• – Player can no longer complete a balloon transaction when there is not enough money (no GUI notification of this yet though)
• – Fixed noise distortion model on some primitive drawings.
• – Added new Dwarf mining animations.