It’s been a while since I’ve updated, so for anyone wondering; I’m still here, and still working on Slave Craft. I was sick for a while, and took a bit of a break, but I’m back at it now. In fact, I may have become drunk with power.

You see, I had this issue a while back involving the game map. In technical terms, it was All Fucked Up™. I wanted to (and did) replace it with a better map system. I’ll talk about the implementation in greater detail later. For now, the important thing to know, is that the new map is way better. Like immeasurably better. In technical terms, it is Totally Not Fucked Up™.

The problem was, when I made the changes I hit a huge performance wall. Since the new map involves actual, real, honest to code path-finding, this was a problem. But I sorted it out (again, technical details later). In a nutshell, I optimized something that was initially taking 250 seconds to compute, down to 10 milliseconds (this is the part where I start getting drunk with power). So I start thinking; Wow I’ve got all this extra processing time! I should do something with it!

The path-finding was originally meant for you slaves. When their AI kicks in, and they make decisions, they need to know the distance to everything in the game world. So I start thinking; if a player has 20 slaves, and each slave’s AI takes 20 milliseconds; worst-case scenario is the game lags for 400ms. Now none of that is very likely. Who wants to manage 20 slaves at once? What are the chances all 20 AIs kick in at the same time? Is 400ms even a problem for a game that doesn’t need to maintain a high FPS?

So here’s my crazy idea: What if I make every NPC in the game run using the same AI system? And with that, I’ve just turned Slave Craft into crazy massive game world. I’ll talk about some of the new design changes a little later, including:

• What the map looks like
• How NPCs are going to work
• The new Choose Your Own Adventure mode I’ll be adding

More updates forthcoming,

DP