A development blog being a development blog, let's chitchat about I have been working on recently : Encounters AI. Well, of course, I will insert crappy theories in it, nobody can't stop me from being a bugger.

  So, how did it get started ? The one to blame thank is Melliores. He asked about fleeing creatures scripts and all "AI and how we can make battles more interesting" on the development board.

 Honestly, Melliores is great, but I found he was even greater that day. Fighting creatures in NwN ( 1 & 2 ) has never been very fun if you used the basic system. As a single player, I was very disapointed when I tried it after Baldur's Gates II where I had big fun in battles. Creatures wait for you to give them the last blast, they are a challenge mostly if you don't have the valid AC and if they do enough damage. 

So that quickly catched my interest. I looked around at what had been done before, and I found amazing stuff, like Tony_K system, or Jasperre's amongst others. And I started thinking about all that, what would be fun to see encounters do etc. Then, GrinningFool got interested and trusted me (be thanked for that) and set a first objective : use local controllers to lightweight the CPU consumption.  Later, he asked for a complete spawning system. Do you know why ?

 Khalidine will offer /both/ roleplay and action. And standards might be high for both. We don't like flavorless roleplay and quests. And we don't like flavorless action. We want to have strategic, involving fights. And not XP farm, with stupid no-defense encounters. 

 So there we are. I have currently implemented my part of that system during the last weeks. It allows us to have full control over encounters, more than what the game basically allows. The spawn system rules will permit us to randomize as we want, and finegrain the creatures spawn related to PCs level. The encounters will act as team with leaders, common morale values and targets. They might have functions in their team ( Archers / Buffers / Casters / Healers at the moment ) and act as we want them too. Hostile creatures will flee, and players will receive Experience Points for such accomplishments. Killing ALL the creatures ? Sign of evilness... Or stubborn dead-aggressive enemies... When you common kobolds will be probably more cowards :)

Anyway, here is a small video to show you how it actually works in its rough state. There is one very good thing in it, which is this Khalidine theme made by Sellsword ! Thanks for him. Ah, well, the blood splashes, I think they rock too ! 

 I'm not too happy with the result of the capture, for many reasons including a low capacity computer, a single player that is hacked to be quick and resisting, a crappy testing map, etc.

 But you will notice how encounters might autobuff, that our archers keep their distance, creatures flee when combat starts to be turning bad or if they estimate melee is not the best option, and all sort of other fun behaviors, which will hopefully make combats in Khalidine more fun than what the game basically offers.

Ediitor's note: the area shown in this video was created for testing AI, and isn't reflective of the appearance of in-game areas ;)