It's been another 2 months! We've been working on a number of things:
melee combat 2.0
interactive PCs
switching to another animation system (again)
enemies AI
tutorial
We will be showcasing them a bit later.
For now we just wanted to show the current state of how the enemies behave.
The enemies rely on seeing and hearing things.
We want the game to clearly tell you if you've been spotted. So we made a visual and a sound indicator for AI's suspicion meter.
This is how the suspicion meter works:
Enemies will have different health, speed and sight-hearing radius. Also they will behave differently when it comes to melee:
the Heavy is a fan of uppercut
the Mask is a fast-kick guy
the Mall Guard doesn't actively seek trouble, but when it finds him - he uses the baton.
They will shoot at you from different types of guns.
they will react to other guards being down AND they will wake them up (if still alive) - a feature that existed in early Splinter Cell's but that was removed in later games
Different types of guards have different weak points for the shocker - more on this here.
we did a couple of iterations on pathfinding and waypoint system. It took some time to figure out how to make AIs walk through the doors.
Plus, each guard now has their own inventory. The door in this video requires a certain keycard. The guard has it, so he walks in freely. Which means, if you neutralize him - what's his becomes yours, and you would get the keycard!