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As everyone knows, good AI is essential in a tactical shooter that includes Single Player and Coop modes. We have taken a big leap forward in achieving that goal for Ground Branch with the addition of Phil Carlisle (zoombapup on the forums). BlackFoot Studios will be collaborating on developing both a friendly and enemy AI solution for Ground Branch and Unreal Engine 4 in general. Phil brings a vast work history and knowledge and we look forward to working with him to bring the world of Ground Branch alive!

Phil Carlisle has been making games for more than 20 years. Initially as programmer on the multi-million selling Worms series of games for Team17. Then as an indie developer using a variety of engine technologies. During his time as an indie, he has written chapters in books such as the AI Wisdom series, the Game AI Pro series and has written and published academic work in a number of books and conference papers. He also served as CTO for a startup AI company focussed on emotional AI characters and user-centric AI programming tools called StoryBricks. More recently Phil has been contributing to the AI knowledge base for Epic’s newly released Unreal Engine and has been finishing up his PhD work on Digital Actors. Phil’s personal goal is to empower game designers to create believable characters by creating easily usable tools that drive more dynamic characters in much the same manner as a director drives an actor’s performance.

Phil plans on charting his progress with forum posts and videos, so please check him out in the BFS forums!

Hello all!

I wanted to give a quick update on the Tech Preview release…. Just about there. The testers found a few issues that must be fixed before release and we are working on those. We are also trying to squeeze in a few more features that may seem small, but play a large role in defining what Ground Branch is all about. The Tech Preview is a huge step for us and one that we want to be absolutely sure that those that play it are able to come away understanding what we are going for and what Ground Branch is going to be. I am also trying to finalize some storefront issues as well. So the countdown is in days now, not weeks. 🙂

Two of those small but significant “Ground Branch” features that we’ll give a glimpse of here are user patches and control scripting.

PATCHES

We have basic support in for user created patches. At the moment, there are slots on each arm and the baseball hat to place a patch. Each slot can have its own patch as well. We haven’t worked out all the backend stuff just yet, but patches are images on disk that are loaded directly into the game either locally or from the server. Of course there will be rules that are setup and restrictions on how things work so not to create issues for people. For you old schoolers…. think back to how Rainbow Six worked in this area.

Of course, everything is work in progress here.

CONTROL SCRIPTS

This one is definitely more behind the scenes….something so simple yet so powerful. Our key binding works in the traditional way, but you can also craft a script that sets up custom actions or binding groups. Almost anything that is bindable is scriptable as well. Instead of these actions being hard coded you have complete control to setup what you want. For instance, say you don’t like the standard toggle lean setup. Simply make a script that changes it to a momentary one that requires you to hold the key to stay leaned and release the key to go back.

Here is an example of the LeanLeftToggle control script:

{
"ActionName": "LeanLeft",
"Version": 2,
"Name": "Lean Left (Toggle)",
"Description": "Press to left left. Press again to cancel.",
"ScriptData": [
{
"ButtonUsage": "Pressed",
"Entries": [
{
"Is": "Leaning",
"Parameter": "Left",
"TrueEntries": [
{
"Function": "StopLeaningLeft"
}
],
"FalseEntries": [
{
"Function": "StartLeaningLeft"
}
]
}
]
}
]
}

We will provide a cheat sheet of all the necessary keywords from the code to make your own scripts as well. These scripts are loaded from disk by clicking the ‘Options’ icon for each keybind.

So there you go. Not much longer and some cool stuff. Have a great weekend!

AI is still a bit out, but Epic is doing some really nice things with their built in AI solution. Its not just bots anymore.

We certainly plan to have our AI react as humanly possible given our resources and time though.

We are not setting out to make a huge arsenal of weapons. Modders will take care of that for sure. We will have a pretty standard set covering Pistol/SubMachineGun/AssaultRifle/Shotgun/LightMachineGun/Sniper/Explosive

We don’t plan on including any “active” reload situations or random fouling sorts of things. Yes, that stuff does happen in real life, but we feel its just an annoyance in a a game and just frustrates people for no reason. Attachments will have actual impact on the weapons/ammo as well. They won’t be just for show.

We are planning on having extensive breaching capabilities for doorway entry…. including breaching shotguns, charges, kicking and other. We have even prototyped a way to allow players to block doorways from being breached. Not sure if that will make it in or not.

What we probably won’t have much of is arbitrary wall breaching and things like that. That isn’t an area we have the resources to tackle.

Mission Planning is up in the air at the moment. For CoOp, the plan is to have a pre-mission planning phase where live players can work out their “x’s and o’s” together, but planning for SP a’la Rainbow Six may be out of the scope of GB for now.

I’m not sure if we will have the budget to record different sounds, but we definitely have environmental settings that process sound based on indoor/outdoor. It all depends on how much funding we can get.

I guess that’s up to you and how you play I think. Ground Branch is not designed as a run ‘n gun game simply by the shoot/move mechanics and the way weapons work. We aren’t a sim though so we strive to make things as streamlined as possible. We don’t want you thinking about controls and key combos during play.

Yes there will be plenty of diversity. There will be locations all over the world…. think R6 in this respect.

And now some art.

We have a few art assets that has been around for a while, so I thought it a good time to start updating some things. Ground Branch will have frag, smoke and flashbang grenades…. even with various colors of smoke.

As some of you know, one of my good friends Tom (our very own MONOLITH on the forums) is a very good writer. He has taken upon himself to do what he can to help our soldiers that are deployed away from home. Tom has started a project called Words For Warriors to send free books to those service members.

Please take a moment and help Tom out if you can.

http://www.tomreinhart.com/words-for-warriors/