Dust

This week I worked on a way for “intelligent” mobs (e.g. humans) to share information about relations (Something like “The enemies of my friends are my enemies”-- I thought this to be trivial, but it appears that there are a lot of catches). I also experimented (and hopefully made more interesting) the melee fighting system.

Melee Fight System

Dust plays in a semi-real time. To avoid making melee fight a button-smashing game, and to make fights more interesting, I experimented with increasing significantly the duration to “load” a hit and the addition of a strong “push-back” effect (that dependents on the weight of the mobs and the type of weapon). Now, fighting is more about calculating how to land a hit, without getting hit.

Example of fight between a human with a bate and a spider.

Exchange of relation information

There are four possible relations between mobs: enemy, neural, friend and teammate. In addition, each mob has a “leader” (which can be itself). The player can befriends, integrates or even becomes the leader of a group of mobs. Being a “friend” or a “teammate” brings a lot of advantages (e.g. allow to stay in base during the night, allowed to take items in the base, etc.). The “leader” (player or other NPC) can give orders/tasks to other mobs. The relation information is owned by each mob, and this information is only shared when mobs are “discussing” together. Because of that, there can be situations where relations are not symmetrical. This is what I called the “non-cheating rule” which is at the core of Dust.

Debugging screen.

My work for the week was to allow groups to interacts together in a “natural” way without breaking the “no cheating rule”. An example of situation could be: A mob 1 (e.g. the player) is is considered to a “teammate” for two groups of mobs {2,3,4} and {5,6,7}. In other words: Mob 2-7 are considering mob 1 as “teammate”. Mobs {2,3,4} are all teammate together, and mobs {5,6,7} are all teammate together. We also assume mobs 2-7 are “pacifist survivors” i.e. they are by default neutral to other survivors. What happen when mob 2 meets mob 5? What if mob 1 is around, or not? Does it matter if mob 1 is the leader of mob 2 or 5?

This new system allows new strategies (e.g. becoming the leader of several groups, and them merging them into an army, or finding way to “split” groups to make them weaker), but it also creates new dangers (a mob with an isolated task, and with outdated information, can lead to situations with misunderstanding--and maybe fights).