Hi everyone, maybe some of you remember me, I used to be quite around at this forum some time ago.I am the AI programmer @ Ultima-Unreal (www.ultima-unreal.de), but for a set of reasons, I won't get to finish my work, so we need a skilled coder to do it.
UU has already developed quite far, we even got a few lines in Gamestar, Germany's biggest pc gaming magazine. We have three coders working, me, Carone and Knuth.
For people who are around in the Deus Ex Mod Community, there is no need to introduce almighty Carone, for UU, he's doing spells and weapons mostly.
When not working on UU, Knuth is busy finishing his own engine, which has got a lot of cool features, e.g. it can read both UT and QuakeIII maps. For UU he has already finshed a new OpenGL driver, which adds an important new feature to the UT engine: distance fog!
So this is what we've got so far:
- particlesystem for all kinds of effects
- flagsystem for non-linear maps
- conversation system for dialogues with multiple-choice, animations, setting flags (so the map "knows" what has been talked), ...
- working new inventory system and hud
- working skill-system (a bit like in Diablo)
- ingame-version of Hugh MacDonald's UMS for video sequences (thanks Hugh!)
- weapons and spells are being finished atm
and we have got 75% of the AI. My main goal was to make an AI, which makes believable behaviour possible. Let me give you an example: when an NPC sees the player (or even some other NPC) and has something to tell him, he'll run towards him, if it's an important message. Otherwise he'll only walk. If he finds some money laying on the street as he's walking towards the player, he'll get attracted by it and pick it up, before proceeding to the player. If he's got something important so say, he might ignore the money and first talk to the player and then go pick it up.
This is achieved by the Scripted Actions system, which is finished. This is the heart of my AI, mappers can put a SA-object into the map, and put in commands like, Pawn1, go there, play that anim and this sound etc., and the pawn will do so, as soon as the Scripted Actions are triggered. Its a complex system, you can put in conditions under which a SA may only be triggered (this is where the flag manager comes in) and so on. SA's are also part of the standard AI, e.g. as soon as an NPC finds a dead body that he's never seen before, a predifined SA will tell him to freak out or investigate it etc. The SA system is an important tool to give the player the impression of a living environement.
This is what we need you to do:
We have no combat AI yet. This part of the AI may be heavily based on Unreal/UT code. The interesting thing about this is coding the behaviour for the different types of enemies, ranging from primitive dwarfs to magicians who can choose between various spells. So your task as an AI Coder at Ultima Unreal will be coding the combat AI and making it work with the rest of the AI (which is practically bug-free).
We can only use people who are skilled and experienced, preferably coders who have already worked on AI. It's an advantage (but no condition!) to speak German, since the whole team does and I wrote my comments to the code in German. But since almost everybody in the team speaks English and I can translate the comments for you, this shouldn't keep you from doing it. So if you're interested or want some more information, reply to this post or feel free to contact me via ICQ (#125420057)
!
UU has already developed quite far, we even got a few lines in Gamestar, Germany's biggest pc gaming magazine. We have three coders working, me, Carone and Knuth.
For people who are around in the Deus Ex Mod Community, there is no need to introduce almighty Carone, for UU, he's doing spells and weapons mostly.
When not working on UU, Knuth is busy finishing his own engine, which has got a lot of cool features, e.g. it can read both UT and QuakeIII maps. For UU he has already finshed a new OpenGL driver, which adds an important new feature to the UT engine: distance fog!
So this is what we've got so far:
- particlesystem for all kinds of effects
- flagsystem for non-linear maps
- conversation system for dialogues with multiple-choice, animations, setting flags (so the map "knows" what has been talked), ...
- working new inventory system and hud
- working skill-system (a bit like in Diablo)
- ingame-version of Hugh MacDonald's UMS for video sequences (thanks Hugh!)
- weapons and spells are being finished atm
and we have got 75% of the AI. My main goal was to make an AI, which makes believable behaviour possible. Let me give you an example: when an NPC sees the player (or even some other NPC) and has something to tell him, he'll run towards him, if it's an important message. Otherwise he'll only walk. If he finds some money laying on the street as he's walking towards the player, he'll get attracted by it and pick it up, before proceeding to the player. If he's got something important so say, he might ignore the money and first talk to the player and then go pick it up.
This is achieved by the Scripted Actions system, which is finished. This is the heart of my AI, mappers can put a SA-object into the map, and put in commands like, Pawn1, go there, play that anim and this sound etc., and the pawn will do so, as soon as the Scripted Actions are triggered. Its a complex system, you can put in conditions under which a SA may only be triggered (this is where the flag manager comes in) and so on. SA's are also part of the standard AI, e.g. as soon as an NPC finds a dead body that he's never seen before, a predifined SA will tell him to freak out or investigate it etc. The SA system is an important tool to give the player the impression of a living environement.
This is what we need you to do:
We have no combat AI yet. This part of the AI may be heavily based on Unreal/UT code. The interesting thing about this is coding the behaviour for the different types of enemies, ranging from primitive dwarfs to magicians who can choose between various spells. So your task as an AI Coder at Ultima Unreal will be coding the combat AI and making it work with the rest of the AI (which is practically bug-free).
We can only use people who are skilled and experienced, preferably coders who have already worked on AI. It's an advantage (but no condition!) to speak German, since the whole team does and I wrote my comments to the code in German. But since almost everybody in the team speaks English and I can translate the comments for you, this shouldn't keep you from doing it. So if you're interested or want some more information, reply to this post or feel free to contact me via ICQ (#125420057)
!