Another month, another update (i may start making these smaller, but more frequent)

Features

Healthbar

New HUD does not lag behind the camera and is drawn in pixel art form by the artist of the game. Two bars represent health and sprint.

New camera

The camera now moves to a half-point between the player and the cursor, interpolating towards it, creating a nice smooth transition.

Alert states

The NPC now follow a (at least temporarily) Metal Gear Solid inspired alert system of Alert, Evasion and Caution phases, which will be adjusted and modified, and may end up quite different than what it is modeled after. There's a timer for each of the phases, displayed in a debug window in the top part of the window. It is yet to be seen if the end game will show the remaining time or not.

Player animations overhaul (in-progress)

The player animations are in process of being fully overhauled, with additional frames for smoother movement, and more detail placed. This is the player animations counterpart of the walls overhaul that preceeded this one (change in perspective).

Search

During the search phase, the NPC guards will proceed to search the area for the player, attempting to pathfind to random locations on the map. This behaviour is in a very rudimentary state, and will be adjusted or even entirely overhauled to prevent silly guard behavior.

Patrols

NPCs now can follow a pre-placed patrol path in the levels, a basic behavior a stealth game should have. This is also in a rudimentary stage, and must be expanded upon (patrols that loop around, nodes having wait times, different speeds, etc.)

Engine

A lot of work has been put into completion of asset creation pipeline, including creating an Object maker program for use by the artist to bind the animations (sprites) and the actual in-game object together, which can be fed to the engine then. Additional work has been done on the NPC code to optimize it further.

• Object maker
• Overall optimisation of npc code
• Multiple debug tooltips and windows to allow easier measurement of the game behavior by the developers.
• NPCs are able to die now, although with a missing animation (their sprite is merely darkened to show that the npc's health has depleted)
• Frustum culling introduced

Fixes

• NPCs sight code's vector normalization calculations have been fixed, making npcs actually able to see much better.
• NPC sight now obstructed by the walls.
• NPCs now shoot at appropriate angles or they don't at all (no more will they shoot directly down when without target)