Lots of interesting progress since last time!
Exhibition Season 2: I’m definitely ready to kick off Ex2, but I’ve made a lot of progress on some cool features so the plan is being adjusted. (More on that coming)
Coaches: Here’s where a lot of the recent work went. Frankly, it was a huge pain to call plays for both teams. My laziness cause me to move up the AI coach system from Ex3 to now. At first, I just hacked together a system that would randomly call an offensive or defensive play, just so I didn’t have to do it. It quickly became apparent that I still had to call special teams plays for the CPU, or the game would crash. Ok, I’ll just have them call those too…..
In order to do that, I had to put situational awareness into the coach AI. Cool, that’s not hard. I’ll just add some basic situational awareness in…….
Now it works, but I have to double-check that the CPU isn’t calling my really bad plays. (I have some really poorly designed plays). I’ll just remove those from the playbook…….
Now I don’t have enough plays. 🙁 No problem, I’ll just start creating plays…….
Of course, all the plays are created for the Greens roster. I really don’t need to see pocket passers running the QB dive. Now I have to double-check the CPU playcall, which is just as bad as calling it myself. I can fix that, I’ll just have the coach AI keep track of which plays worked and which didn’t! Then they can focus on the plays that work……..
Ok, in order to do that, I need to create a system to track how each play worked during the game….. and I might as well track over the whole season. Wait, if I want to track over the whole season, I need to be able to save and load that information…. ugh!
*down the rabbit hole we go*
When I came back out of the rabbit hole, the entire AI playcalling system was done!
Which then brings us to the bonus activity and the Ex2 plan. As I was setting up the Ex2 schedule and getting ready to replay the Oranges, a thought occurred to me. I don’t really want to play the games for the non-Greens teams. I don’t really care who wins between the Yellows and the Reds.
*DING!*
OMG, I already have everything in place for CPU vs CPU games! I just need to make a few changes so the game keeps running when I’m not clicking the buttons.
And there is it. I put all 4 teams on CPU mode and let both games run for 100 plays each. (simultaneously)
I even walked away and got a cup of coffee while it ran! No crashes, no stoppages, and no errors! The first actual CPU-CPU game(s) in regen3 history!!
The purpose of Ex2 was to make sure whole games could be played. I’d anticipated that it would take all season to get it working, but we’re already there. Ex3 was planned to start rolling this into a league-wide structure, but I’m not quite ready for that yet.
So here’s the new plan:
Ex2 is going to be more like Ex2.5. I’m going to add a couple more teams and regenerate the player pool. I’ll also create a way to do the allocation draft from within the game.
Once that’s done, I’ll kick off Ex2.5. During the season, I’ll finish up all the animation stuff I wanted to do in Ex2, and build the league stuff I wanted to have done in Ex3. Once we get to the end of Ex2.5, we’ll see if there’s a need for another exhibition season, or if enough was completed that we can just roll into the first regular* season.
Exciting times!
*The difference between the exhibition seasons and the regular season is history. Once regular seasons start, players and history carry over from one season to the next.