godot 4 will allow extending custom nodes ... this might be very important for our needs

Those Gdextension system is so nice

What does that mean?

You could already extend scripts and nodes right?

Or do you mean at runtime?

for eg. our units are all inheriting the base custom Unit class (

class_name Unit

), but our goap AI agents live in a node inside the unit scene and they extend the basic godot node (

extends Node

). With the new version we would be able to create a class that extendeds our Units (

extends Unit

) and this will give us a lot of flexibility

Hmmm I guess I thought it was already this way, shows I haven't done much maybe

now it supports JSON edit

Oh it’s at RC now, I hadn’t even noticed!

yep, we are getting close :)

well, "close" I suppose. Who knows how long this cycle lasts 😅

we will also get support for multiline comments! i like it very much

I'm excited for the fact that the .NET integration is now based on source generators. Yes, it means a lot more work is needed to get it to work with F# but it also means that we can create our own glue instead. Already have some plans to get the Godot F# integration better thanks to this change :)

How are the Crafty Components doing?

they are still not ready to be split. i was focused on making everything work (again) and now I'll focus on the campaign, so it might take a while.

on the bright side I've met some more experienced godot devs here in spelkolectivet and they will help me make the components even better

Alright that's great to hear. Keep up the great work, rafa zero.

thx to the guy that made the image above I learned a lot of godot inner workings and now I have a lot of improvements to make to our code. During our chat/lesson I asked him to open an issue so I would not forget the tip, he was really helpfull and his nick is TheDuriel. We were on a previous discussion and we had completely opposite opinions on an issue I've opened on godot proposal's git rep and now I got to meet him in person. Amazing coincidence and a reminder to always be nice on the internet. You might soon be face to face with anyone you talk to and being polite will avoid any regrets.

Hello so, I heard Godot 4 is releasing soon.

Yup! Weekly release candidates coming out at this point.

I've checked and I really think it's worth to withhold our migration til some things are properlly fixed.

I've moved our camera scene and script to autoloads and renamed them Crafty_camera. It's probably gonna be the first crafty module since it's pretty simple and it's only supposed to pan, zoom and respect map limits in different screen sizes and aspect ratios (also send signals for the minimap cam_rect). After creating the resourses files to hold our dialog data, I'm gonna try do make some kind of story board for our campaign. Now that we have the building blocks to deliver it, I'm feeling that I shouldn't jump straight to the code and first try to make a consistent plan to avoid going back and forward too much.

First crafty module, huzzah!

While reimplementing our goap AI system in JS I realized we can improve our implementation a lot. For eg. we are currently not simulating the state change after the action happens ... and we are basically just using the current state in our action validation. If we use both previous and next states we can have smarter AI that does things like:

validate (prevState, nextState):
  return nextState.player.wood > prevState.player.wood
}

and only take an action if the future state is actually better instead of "assuming" it. This makes the goap system heavier on one hand since it's actions will be simulating the future and I'll have to add a new methods to "convert" goap actions into unit actions. But it will also mean that the goap actions can be lighter and just show the value changes instead of controling the units actions. It will also make our system closer to a real STRIPS planning architecture.

We are on our way with our migration to 4.0 ... as expected some new bugs appeared, but so far they are all already listed on godot's issues and they've been flagged as bugs so there will probably be a quick solution. And I'm getting help with the skills again, so we will get a 4.0 release sooner then I expected!