This week our focus was on AI and combat behavior. Over time the AI simply had become too organic, with too many subsystems interacting creating behavior that was erratic and sometimes downright broken. We’ve cleaned out many redundant systems in the AI and made things much simpler and therefore AI behavior should have become more consistent.

The most notable change should be that the AI now respects that for the player combat should be slow and deliberate, so it acts more slow and deliberate itself. Most of the time, anyway.

This is not the last of the AI issues we are currently working on. Problems remain with targeting, and we’ve seen that sometimes the AI acts somewhat erratically. Running NPCs sometimes have trouble getting through doors, and we haven’t really checked how the AI acts around doors that can be opened and closed. Still on the whole, the AI changes should be a pretty big improvement.

AI Improvements
- Removes many redundancy in the AI subsystems, which should lead to more consistent behavior overall.
- Improves AI combat behavior. It now acts slower and more deliberate in most cases.
- Improves the ability of the AI to find paths, follow paths, and follow leaders.
- Fixes a number of time-scale AI issues which caused AI to go idle for way too long in some cases…

Bug Fixes
- Addresses a generator issue where the container in the Dandelion Pit level was missing.
- Relocates enemies that spawn or are pushed ‘out-of-bounds’.
- When a clan is hostile there won’t be an envoy for them in Haven.
- You can craft bandages.
- Potential fix of a possible crash when talking to an NPC that can give you tasks.
- Fixes a case where the game generated inconsistent water levels.
- If you return to Haven after the end of an episode, puzzle items get discarded.
- When an NPC offers a conversation you don’t automatically turn to face them.
- When an NPC wants your attention, they don’t call out every 2 seconds.
- Small barrows generate more consistently.
- Hit boxes for ‘spitters creatures’ are pulled a little further out of the wall where they live, making hitting them more consistent.
- Flame spitters are actually immune to the flames of other flame spitters.

Other Changes
- Optimizes opening the inventory menu when you have many items.
- Removed the armor for lower level imperials.
- Removed the chance lower level imperials have shields.
- Changed the way the game calls up an explorer window after a bug report. Hopefully this behavior is now more consistent across different systems and OS settings.
- NPCs of a faction that is hostile towards you, but encounter you on the territory of another faction react to you as if they were only angry.