Posted this in the v0.7 predictions thread, but I guess Ii should post it here too...
- The improved map generation algorithm I posted about in the dev topic
- ...and lots of new rooms to distinguish the new "zones" from each other
- At least three new SCPs. One of them is a quite big addition, the others are basically just minor curiosities like 895, with very little gameplay value.
- Different sound sources placed in various rooms - the vents make a quiet hissing sound, there's a deep rumbling sound in the nuke room, an alarm siren wailing in the red dead-end room, etc...
- New scripted events (SCP-096 doesn't just sit in that one room anymore
)
- Plenty of bugfixes as usual
I've also been thinking of rewriting the NPC AI system. When I wrote current system I had no idea I'd add something like the MTF to the game, so it was basically just designed for simpler behaviors like those of 173 and 106. The logic for deciding which task to do has become so complicated that every change to the AI of the MTF causes a ton of bugs, and making the NPCs interact with each other and do multiple tasks at the same time (like waiting for a tesla gate to deactivate while looking at 173) would take a huge amount of work with the current system.
I think I'll move away from the current finite state machine approach towards a utility-based system. For those who aren't familiar with AI programming, in an utility-based AI there's a list of possible actions the NPC can make (attack, search, follow someone, go to a location, etc), each of them are given a score based on which task is most appropriate for the situation, and the action with the best score is chosen. This would help making the AI a bit more flexible - an MTF unit could choose the best target based on the distance and other factors, one member of a team could keep following the player while the others stay looking at SCP-173, and things like that. I'll also try to make the system easier to customize and expand - instead of writing each NPC type it's own AI, I'll try to write one "universal AI" and assign the NPCs some pre-determined values to define how they should act.
Although, the new AI will take so much work that I doubt it'll make it to the next update. Which will, by the way, probably be ready early next month, or even at the end of this month if everything goes well.
