Weekly Progress Journal: Debugging AI Locomotion & System Architecture
Weekly Focus & Goals
Primary Objective: Resolve the "static movement" bug affecting enemy AI within the current game scene.
Weekly Focus & Goals
Primary Objective: Resolve the "static movement" bug affecting enemy AI within the current game scene.
Specific Goal: Fix the logic where enemies trigger their "walking" animation upon detecting the player’s Sight Range but fail to translate their position in world space.
Work Completed
AI Detection Refinement: Verified the Sight Range trigger logic to ensure the transition from "Idle" to "Alert" states functions correctly.
AI Detection Refinement: Verified the Sight Range trigger logic to ensure the transition from "Idle" to "Alert" states functions correctly.
Technical Troubleshooting: Conducted a deep dive into the Unity Animator and C# movement scripts to identify why the locomotion animation played without spatial displacement.
Visual Artifacts
Design Decisions & Rationale
Rationale: Previously, I added a Position Property directly into the animation frames to ensure the corpse remained in a specific spot upon death. However, this hard-coded position overrode the root transform, causing a conflict with the AI’s navigation code during the movement phase. By isolating these properties, I allow the script to control movement while the animator handles pure visual playback.
Research & Precedents
Technical Root Cause: My research into Unity’s Animation Root Motion and Transform properties revealed that adding positional keys to a looping walk cycle can "lock" the object in place if the code and the animation clip are both trying to command the Transform.position simultaneously.
Technical Root Cause: My research into Unity’s Animation Root Motion and Transform properties revealed that adding positional keys to a looping walk cycle can "lock" the object in place if the code and the animation clip are both trying to command the Transform.position simultaneously.
Feedback & User Testing
Status: N/A for this week. Focus remained on internal technical stability.
Reflection & Next Steps
Reflection: This week was a lesson in the unintended consequences of "quick fixes." While adding the position property solved a visual bug with the death animation, it broke the core locomotion system. I have learned to be more cautious when modifying Transform properties within the Animator.
Reflection: This week was a lesson in the unintended consequences of "quick fixes." While adding the position property solved a visual bug with the death animation, it broke the core locomotion system. I have learned to be more cautious when modifying Transform properties within the Animator.
Next Steps (UI & Core Data Systems):
Persistent Inventory: Develop a global inventory system that carries data across multiple scenes using a Singleton or ScriptableObject pattern.
Navigation & Narrative: Implement the Map System and Quest Log to provide players with clear objectives and spatial orientation.