Action System test

Posted by Michael on December 15th, 2006, in Development

Here’s a little demo of the current state of the project. This concludes the work on the Action System so far. There’s a million little things that we would like to do but with respect to our main motto (“It’s better to make something than nothing”), we will proceed to start building the second big chunk of Drama Princess, the Decision System, next week.

There are four behaviours in this demo that each of the actors can perform: walk to a random position, walk to a random position and sit down, and walk to a random object and walk to the other actor. In the case of the latter, a “Shock” is sent to the other actor that makes him or her turn around and face the actor (not very elegantly for now 😉 ).

These behaviours are just triggered at random. When a behaviour is chosen while another one is still playing, the system first ends the other one. Every behaviour is stored in its own file and loaded in memory every time the behaviour is triggered. If special animations are required to perform the behaviour (like sitting, e.g.), these are included in the behaviour file.

Every actor uses the exact same systems (not copies or instances) with different parameters (stored in an array table). In theory, the system can support an unlimited number of actors (until your videocard gives up) but the maximum in this demo is set to 10 (press the space bar to add an actor).

There is no collision detection but the actors are aware of which objects are close to them. They look at these randomly. If the object is another actor and the other actor looks at them, they will look away.

The idea of this Action System is to give the actors a natural looking idle behaviour with built-in reflexes: spontaneous responses to their environment that do not require any decision making. There’s a lot more we would like to implement (feel free to make suggestions in the comments) but for now it will have to do.

You can download this demo here.
It requires Windows and a 3D videocard.

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