Child of Lothian is a group project of about 22 students, eight artists, ten designers and four programmers. I am the AI programmer in the group.
In Child of Lothian, you play as an Orphan who has been robbed of her childhood as her family is put to trial during the 18th century Witch Hunt trials. The game takes place in the old town of Edinburgh.
As the AI programmer in this project, my goal was to make the NPCs good enough to make the city feel lively; and the guards react smartly to troublemakers. I will mainly focus on underlying techniques like LODs for AI, Tactical nodes and spacial partition mapping.
My part in this project was the creation of general NPC behaviour. The first NPC we
created, I called Brain. Brain is the base NPC for all interactive NPCs to come and for all witch hunters to
follow. Brian was part of the first playable. He will only step aside if the player completes his quest or if
he gets distracted because the player destroyed a lamp.
Right now, he has replaced bey the final
versions.
To realize this, I enhanced the navmesh with a technique discussed in a GDC talk: Spaces in the Sandbox Tactical
Each node on the navmesh knows its neighbours and the nodes it's easy to get to; it also knows which nodes are visible and how interesting a node is. The interest value tells Brain if there is something he needs to check out.
Combining that with an EQS (environment query system), I can steer/direct Brain where I want him to go. Our Brain has four modes the first one is "idle", the second one is "suspicious", the third one is "confirmed", and the fourth one is "find clue".