This update adds a lot of content, but due to time restraints this devlog will be a bit shorter than normal. This update aims to add the AI unit controller and infantry model.

The New Infantry Model

This new infantry model has substantially more detail than the previous one did. Now American infantry carry handguns in holsters (no more guns just randomly appearing in a soldier’s hands) and carry a water canteen as was typical of the time. The belt worn by the infantry now has fully modeled bullets and, overall, better geometry than the previous versions. The infantry face model also includes some new geometry for hair and higher quality eyes.

Of course, the main reason for the creation of the new model is the new animations, which now include going prone, sprinting, and a multitude of death animations. Some of these animations are not yet visible in the current build of the game, but will be in the next update.

There are a few issues with this new infantry model. Due to time restraints, I was unable to make the rigging of certain objects as originally intended, resulting in some clipping issues with the geometry. In addition, the rifle held by the soldier is wildly off and non-conforming. I will need more time to polish this model and the animations, so I did not fully implement the infantry model for this update (there is missing SFX, rigging issues, and an incomplete animation controller). During the next update, I will have a more feature complete and less buggy version of the infantry model, which I’ll use as a template for future infantry variants.

The New Unit Controller

The AI in the game works by having commanding officers give commands and instructions to all infantry within a certain unit. These instructions could be chosen at the beginning of the game as a “battle strategy” that all allied troops would follow. With the new infantry AI, I remade the unit controller to be significantly more powerful and capable. There are now fine tuned controls to specify how long a unit will follow a certain command before acting upon the next command or if there are certain requirements needed to be completed for the next command to be carried out. 

I wanted these strategies to be customizable by the player, so I created a file system where players could edit these strategies to have full control as to how the AI acts. This would act as one of the ways where modding support would be beneficial. Unfortunately, this file system was too complicated for most people to understand and edit. With a new unit controller, a new file system was made to allow for more advanced strategies to be made. However, I took this opportunity to also simplify the process to be as easy as possible. Instead of editing .xml files as was the case in the old system, the new system uses typical .txt files that are easy to read and edit. In the future, I plan to streamline this process further with in-game strategy building tools, in-game video tutorials, and Steam Workshop integration.

The Next Update

Many of the things that I had planned for version 0.1.117 were not implemented in this update, including the “survival” infantry AI states and the rest of the defend and scatter AI behaviors. I also wanted to get the demo to a point where combat could be tested against fully modeled and animated enemies, but I missed that goal as well.

So, I’ll be going a little off of the roadmap that I made a few months ago. The next update will feature all of the content that was planned for this update, but did not make it, as well as a few bug fixes and UI improvements. Content that was originally planned for version 0.1.118 will be pushed back to version 0.1.119.

Quick Reminders

Just as a quick reminder, all additional content in this update is only available on the development map of the game, not on the other maps (as stated before, this will be added to preexisting maps when all the infantry AI systems are complete). You can join the Unsung Heroes 1898 Community Discord server. This post is also available on the Venomic Games website.

Known Issues

(NOTE: many of these issues were present in previous updates and will be resolved soon.)

• Infantry death has been added, but only on the fully modeled infantry soldier (you can test this by pressing “o” a bunch of times while you are playing as that soldier).
• Infantry is sometimes not holding a rifle in third-person and sometimes holding it completely wrong. New fixes to the infantry model are coming soon.
• Enemy soldiers are currently represented as “red-capsules.” This is temporary for the time being.
• Some things that should count as cover, do not. This will be fixed in the main maps in future updates.
• Some behavior states are not fully visible in game (even though they have been implemented).
• The objective points have a “progress bar” above them showing if they have been captured or not. This is still not fully implemented yet and does not rotate to follow the player.
• Infantry can not see enemies that are too far away (even with clear line of sight). This is due to testing values on a smaller map and will be fixed at a later date.
• Infantry AI does not react quickly to nearby enemies present. This will be changed later to allow for faster reaction.
• The map screen has a few UI issues that are not game breaking, but are definitely noticeable. This will be fixed in the next update.
• Commanding officer sfx (specifically the sound coming from the horse) is quite off. This will be updated in the future with better sounds that fit the model’s animations and movements better.

If you find any additional issues or bugs in the game, please report them in the community discord server.