Steering Monsters Around The World
February 27, 2001
My name is Steve Taylor and I worked as a programmer for Wizardry 8. I joined Sirtech and the Wizardry team about a year ago, and by then most of the major game systems were in place. Since then Wiz 8 has evolved from a barely functioning skeleton to a polished, exciting and modern game. It's been really great to be a part of that evolution.My background is in Engineering Physics and image processing. I've always been an avid gamer and game programming enthusiast. I still have disks full of simple games I made long ago on the Apple II. My favourite game genre is the RPG, and I used to design and host pen & paper RPGs for my friends at school. And of course I played every CRPG I could get hold of, including most of the Wizardry series. So after five years working in remote sensing, I decided I'd give a shot at working on games professionally, and Wiz 8 seemed like the perfect fit.
Since I joined the project late, I inherited responsibilities for a diverse set of game systems, including monster pathing, encounter generation, some 2D interfaces, and various game world special effects (such as monster shadows). Getting monsters to path around the world was my first task, and proved to be quite a challenge. Outside of combat, all monsters move simultaneously (we call it "on patrol") and have to avoid walls and each other while they roam around in packs searching for a good fight. At any given time, there might be as many as 60 monsters patrolling around the world this way. Our levels are basically free-form, and the monsters have to avoid getting stuck in jagged narrow passages and tight corners despite the fact that they come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes. And of course this all has to be done without dragging down the frame rate! To tackle the pathing problem I adapted some ideas from Craig Reynolds' Steering Behaviors For Autonomous Characters, a great resource on the subject of pathing for games. Containment steering, crowd path following, leader following, unaligned collision avoidance, and queuing behaviours are all implemented in the game. Have a look at the leader following demo from this page, and you'll have a good idea of what wandering monster packs look like in Wiz 8. Thanks Craig!
Working with Wizardry team has been as exciting and challenging as I hoped it would be. The problems are difficult but solvable, the feedback from changes is immediate and satisfying, the people are great fun... even the bugs can be a riot! Wizardry 8 is the kind of addictive old-school RPG that got me interested in RPGs in the first place. I hope you enjoy playing Wizardry 8 as much as I enjoyed being part of creating it!
Steve Taylor
Sirtech Canada
Previous Wizardry 8 Design Log:
Charles Miles (February 20, 2001)
Related Links:
Wizardry 8 Intelligence Report (September, 1999)
VN Wizardry 8 Forum