The AI is too smart for me..
The easter weekend was a great opportunity for me to catch up on some CC2 development work. It’s pretty comical watching everything ‘work’ but with minimal eye candy. Cavemen spinning around 360 degrees to represent picking up a rock, growing and shrinking to represent sleep, and hideously unrealistic tree sprites to represent vegetation on the map.
Despite this it’s still exciting to see the cavemen going around doing what they’re supposed to be doing. I guess it’s similar to writing an application in unix and seeing it ‘work’, even though it’s not visually very appealing.
I was working last night trying to fix what I thought were epic glitches in the AI of the preparers and gatherers. They were prioritising meat, yet preparing fruit, or vice versa. Or, I’d set all cavemen to go to sleep and only half of them would. This morning I discovered that in most cases, they were actually doing the right thing after all. They might’ve been prioritising meat, but they [i]weren’t actually trained to prepare meat[/i]. It’s just nice to see the system come together, especially considering that in Caveman Craig 2 there are a lot more factors to everything that cavemen do. Particularly energy and interaction from Craig. For example, below is the line of code that makes a caveman walk the correct speed when dragging a carcass. His speed is dependant on his intelligence / skill in dragging, how heavy the carcass is, who else is dragging the carcass with him (the more people, the faster), *AND* how much energy he has, which degrades slowly throughout the day.
walkspeed = -((3*skill_meat)/harvestID.myWeight)*max(.3,min(1,myEnergy/40))*harvestID.carriers
Now, I’m no mathmatician, so when I see this code I wonder how in the hell I managed to conjure up such a calculation.
In other news, I’ve changed the blog look again (with a nice custom header), and I’ve locked the suggestions page – I’ve had an overwhelming response and I need to process what I’ve got 
Regards,
Rhys Andrews
Gatherers chill with Craig around a bed of rocks.
Does this mean CC2 will come out soon? I hope so! However, if there are still glitches, fix them. I can wait a little longer for a High-quality game.
It more just means it’s on its way to completion. No end in sight yet
If you look at the top banner, you can see the other cavemen have blue on their togas…Looks and sounds cool, though!
i got something that i felt odd. Why do you call “hunters” as hunters? I mean hunters should go beyond your boundary’s in search of prey. But in CC, hunters look more like defending than hunting. I don’t know if it’s because they are cowards or you didn’t relies that.
The hunters take down dinosaurs, and the gatherers take them back to the cave for preparing. That’s the ‘hunting’ element to them. Sure, they defend the tribe from threats, too..
I know, but what i mean is that it would be cool if the hunters find the dinosaur’s instead of waiting for them to enter Craig’s territory.
Also, the carnivore’s should kill the herbivore’s as well as caveman.
The dinosaurs should also fight each other, so, it wouldn’t look as if they just come to your territory to wipe out your tribe.