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Alive and Ticking: Now with exploding ants

Name:	Tom Bampton
Date Posted:	Nov 03, 2006
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Blog post

When we were originally working on concepts for Alive and Ticking, Nauris sketched up some concepts for critters. After getting the A-Star code running, I threw together some simple AI using some past GID assets for placeholder.

At that time, it didn't really work properly and I since rewrote a bunch of the AI code. Whilst the critters have been there for most of this year, they were disabled. The other day I finally got around to making them work again so there was something to do in single player games.

If I remember correctly, the ant was made by Ben Chavigner and animated by Matt Mitman. The anthill was made by Logan Foster.

The AI is pretty simple. The ants run around aimlessly until they see a player, then they home in on him and explode. They will respawn at their anthill if it hasnt been blown up.

Screenshots don't really do it justice, so here's a video.

Click for video, ~9.4MB Zipped WMV

Recent Blog Posts

List:	08/20/07 - GID23 and NPC Editor 07/25/07 - Fun with Lua 06/11/07 - How NOT to make a game 11/18/06 - Thinking Outside the Box 11/03/06 - Alive and Ticking: Now with exploding ants 10/28/06 - Fun with zips 10/02/06 - Alive and Ticking gets to Beta .... err, almost. (Warning: Screenshot Heavy) 09/08/06 - Internal Name Operator

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Matthew Spindle Harris (Nov 03, 2006 at 09:04 GMT)

Nice! I don't really like the camera tho for some reason. I think it should be mounted less Rigid. Will there be a Mac Demo?

Tom Bampton (Nov 03, 2006 at 09:09 GMT)

The camera is already on the list of things to change. There has been a Mac build for ages.

Phil Carlisle (Nov 03, 2006 at 09:19 GMT)

You do realize you have "Ant Attack" there dont you? The old speccy game :)

Tom Bampton (Nov 03, 2006 at 09:40 GMT)

Damn, guess thats another thing to add the the enormous list of other games that can be made on this codebase :)

Andy Hawkins (Nov 03, 2006 at 11:56 GMT)

Did you get the A Star from a resource here at GG? I should probably try to plug this in for the Skelly pack.

Tom Bampton (Nov 03, 2006 at 13:44 GMT)

Nope. A general A-Star solution would have cost me far more time then just implementing it myself, and would have been significantly slower. There are a ton of optimizations that I could do due to the way I implemented the level code.

Florian (Nov 04, 2006 at 16:04 GMT)

haha, lookin fun, but can you even die? XD

Tom Bampton (Nov 04, 2006 at 16:14 GMT)

Yeh, you can die. I just had invincibility turned on when i took the movie since I was trying to track down an obscure bug.

Jeff Loveless (Nov 05, 2006 at 07:23 GMT)

how much of a performance hit do you get using the a* navmesh stuff ?

Tom Bampton (Nov 05, 2006 at 07:51 GMT)

I haven't measured performance yet. I suspect that I am roughly at the limit to what I can get away with using the current code. However, I havent done an optimization pass yet. The best that I can say for now is with 24 ants, the framerate is pretty much the same as without them.

T.
Edited on Nov 05, 2006 07:51 GMT

Jeff Loveless (Nov 06, 2006 at 05:43 GMT)

thats pretty good, I've been thinking about trying out a navmesh system, I'll have to check that A* out.
-Your game looks fun, going to give us a demo when your ready?

Vashner (Nov 07, 2006 at 20:54 GMT)

Have the player deply a turret to blow ants..

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