Preparing the Ground For New AI

It was decided a while ago that a new person should be placed in charge of the scripting and AI modules, and that they should have a lot of time to stay on the subject as we refine the game play experience. To this end I am in the process of removing all the complicated super-clever AI code that did not really work and revert the system to something simpler than can be adopted by a new coder. I am also moving all the hard coded decisions such as whether a character is in PATROL or COMBAT mode into a LUA script which will allow end users to fully customize the experience. I may lose a few performance ticks using all this byte code logic, but I think it will work out for the best, both for the internal team and for the software overall. Step one is to reduce the character to two simple behaviors, which is to walk a patrol along an assigned waypoint and to attack the player when they get close enough. This will involve the introduction of quite a few LUA script commands to achieve, but it also means a myriad of permutations are possible once these basic behaviors are working in the engine.  It's not a quick task, and Rick was happy to berate the whole team for not checking in more 'DONE' items on our internal spreadsheet from today but we are entering a phase of some large multi-day items now and so we will get days like these. The good news is that the result will be a very customization logic system for characters and pretty much any entity too!