Slow but steady progress this week, finding little bugs in the nav map building functions, introducing and fixing problems in the jump trajectory projection, and writing the code to interpret the navigation path and make the entity follow it. It’s not quite done, but it’s getting there.
It looks pretty solid in this example, but unfortunately there’s a lot of cases where it doesn’t work so well. In particular, if the character is directly above the entity the entity has a very difficult time navigating to her, mostly because it tends to hit its head trying to jump up, fall back down, and find itself not in the place it expected to be. Still, I’m now in the very desirable stage where I can see what’s going on, test it with different values, and gradually fix it up until it works right.
Well, it’s desirable in the respect that the process is a lot more hands-on and intuitive now, but less so in the sense that I’ve spent like three weeks working on this now and I’m getting a bit burned out on it. Hopefully, this will only be a few more days of work, and then I can start adding animations and more sophisticated behaviors to this entity to make it really come alive.