Enemy AI and Other Fun Stuff ... Dev Update 3/11/19

Okay, so, first of all, yes, I changed the site look.  I got tired of the old one and found one that I like better.

But, on to the more important stuff:
I am almost finished with the enemy AI!  I've been working on it for a while and am super proud of what I have at this point:
There are three types of enemies: melee, ranged, and "flier"
The melee and ranged enemies are self-explanatory (one fights close up with hand weapons, while the other shoots from distances), but the "flier" is something different (excuse spelling, I wasn't really sure what to call it internally!)
It moves around the waypoints in the same way the other ones do, but at set intervals, it will fly up to the highest point, survey the area, then fly down.  In the game, the player can run and jump on objects of different heights, so the enemies will react to that and try to fly up and shoot the player down.  In VR it is not only quite nerve-racking to suddenly see the flying enemy coming up beside you as you're climbing, but it's a ton of fun to shoot them down from the sky as well.

I also worked on the interaction system a bit better.  Now, objects that can be "used" will stay in your hand until you find an acceptable place to put them, allowing for the trigger button to toggle actions, such as shooting a gun. 
Along with this, I've reworked the grappling hook to play better with VRTK (Virtual Reality ToolKit), and now it works so much better!
Instead of allowing the player to grapple onto anything, I've decided that it can only be used on certain objects you couldn't just jump to, like cranes above you, etc.

One of the next things I will be working on is a collision sound framework.
In VR, it's extremely important to make the world as immersive as possible, and this includes sound.
While music (more about this later this week!) and ambiance are easy to implement, but with so many objects moving around the scene, most of which are controlled by the player's hands, it's hard to have a single audiosource controlling all of them.
So, I've come up with a way to mark different objects as being "made of" different materials (such as wood, metal, stone), and depending on what type of object is colliding with it (while taking into account how hard the object hits the other object), a certain sound will play.  While it's all still conceptual right now, I have a feeling that when I write it up tomorrow it should work properly.

More info to come about this awesome game! :D

Thanks for reading,
Judah