Architecting Robot Intelligences

TL;DL, it's going to take me a while to get real, interesting gameplay, so I'm putting last week's goal on hold. I'll still be working on it, but I'll focus on other things in my posts until I get a little further along.

Did some more work on fleshing out a rendering pipeline today. It's a little new for me. I'm familiar with graphics programming, but I've never had to set up a pipeline for it. The projects I've worked on either had someone else working on that or were too small to need a robust pipeline. It's an annoying problem because there is an absolute 'best' solution (fewest possible GL calls), but in practice, it's better just to settle for a 'good' solution.

As far as actual gameplay goes, I did a little work on that as well. You can use the menu to create build orders now, but I still have to write some AI to make the robots actually carry out those orders. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that that's going to take a while. Since orders can be scattered about the map arbitrarily, I need some way to determine which robot is closest and most qualified to carry out the order. In principle, there could be obstacles in the way (for example, a wall that you had built earlier), which means it's more complicated than just picking the closest robot.

I also need to somehow keep track of which robots are working on which jobs. The robot needs to know so it can work on the job, and the job has to somehow be marked as 'in progress' so that other robots don't take it. Additionally, resources are needed to complete jobs, so those have to be moved to the job site, meaning that I need to give the robots an inventory.

No post tomorrow, I'll be out with friends. And I think I'm going to start writing posts in the morning rather than before bed, so next post should be Sunday Monday morning.