Production Blog 4

The past week or so the team had been focused on getting a lot of the core systems rebuilt and restructured. As for me, I have been focusing on back end data management. One of the stress is how that data is being shared or used. A focus on correctly saving and loading information can be troublesome if something where to be off. One of the main contingency plans if when reading or writing data, there should be a way of double parsing the data where it unpacks said data and basically proofreading it to make sure no weird characters show up in the wrong area for an example lets say the data for money is to be saved and the player has 850. The number 850 will be written into the file but what if the file got corrupted or someone accidentally edited the file so instead of the number 850 is written maybe 85p0 is written, when the reader reads the file it will look for a number but since p is not a number and upon translating the line of text to an integer, the loader would just break. The secondary reader would preread the line to make sure that if the loader is looking for a number perhaps, it will try to identify anything that would be not.

The other topic that I have been relaying about has been the AI Director or specifically the AI combat director as there is also the AI navigation director. The combat director is used as a way of regulating AI combat difficulty and response to the player as the designers/ programmers can have more control on when an AI is in combat. The idea is to have an only select amount of enemy AI to be able to attack the player at a given moment. An idea has been proposed to use a token system. The AI director has a set pool of attack tokens, whenever an AI decides to attack, it will request an attack token from the AI director. Taking an attack token will use it up and if the pool is empty then the next AI cannot attack until the tokens being used is returned. Because of this pool, we have a way of regulating combat by increasing/decreasing the pool based on both how well a player is doing or an in game difficulty setting.