Hey everyone. I haven't made a blog post in quite a while now, so here goes. We've completely scrapped the AI we were working on during the first two terms and replaced it with something that should be a lot better. Thankfully I'm taking two AI classes alongside this project, and they've already been an enormous help.

We have a great new finite state machine design, as well as goal-driven behavior. Basically each character decides which of several goals is of the highest priority, and when it figures that out it instantiates a new state machine with that particular goal in mind, which then controls its behavior. Goals are things like "attack this," "aid my ally over there" or "I need to stay away from enemies to survive." The state machine then takes care of finer actions that will help towards lowering the goal's priority.

We also have been working on pathfinding, so characters can find their way to their goal while avoiding obstacles. We're still working out the kinks in that.

- Jordan