#14 Agent Actions

 

SECRET

DigiMastered Works LLC

Office of Development

DMW107IB1014

Date 09/04/2022 12:00 PM

THIS IS FINALIZED INTELLIGENCE

 

To: The People
From: Tanner Fry
Subject: Agent Actions

 

Operation Actions

    In the quest for improvement and the need for additions, operations have had a few changes. As talked about in our previous article, actions are a large part of any stage within an operation. Actions, currently, are the only way to make strategic and tactical decisions on a grand scale. If you've been following this developer blog, you'll know that we've talked about how operations allow players to assign actions to agents within their agency. Through creating different stages within an operation a player can strategically segment different actions for different needs. 

    Although development has been slow the past few months, operation actions have been implemented on a basic level and can now be used to assign agents to said actions. Moving forward, a quick action bar or something similar is desired so that there's no need to utilize the operation creation UI and can instead give players like you the ability to perform actions in real time. Through this you gain the value of long term strategy, through operations, and short term through the action bar.

    Current actions that can be assigned are as follows:

  •  
    Assassinate Target
  •  
    Bribe Target
  •  
    Extort Target
  •  
    Gather Intel
  •  
    Sabotage Location
  •  
    Prepare Operation Assets
  •  
    Return for Debriefing

    When creating actions you will need to assign an agent to the action at some point. During initial creation, you can do such a thing via the Agent Selection Directory. However, if you want to just create actions and attach agents later, you will be able to select the action and do so. Below is the Action Creation UI coupled with the Agent Selection Directory UI.

A view of an operation's action creation UI.

Action Creation UI

A view of the agent directory popup.

Agent Directory UI

A view of the agent directory with skills popup.

Agent Selection UI Part 1

A view of the agent directory with skills popup.

Agent Selection UI Part 2

    Shown above is the Skills popup. It allows you to see an agent's expertise, when an agent is clicked, and moving forward there's a lot of potential for enhancements to this UI.

Environment Generation Enhancements

    In Operations and the Environment we discuss how the environment is generated through ray casts onto the game map. Though functional, this approach was highly inefficient. In our latest approach we now loop through the generated map's array of pixels, compare said pixels and their region to the desired environment asset being place, and then place said asset if it meets our conditions. This alleviates the need for ray casts which drastically improves the speed of environment generation. 

    Through this increase in speed we gain the ability to add more details in the same, or less, amount of load time, thus providing an improved experience for all who play.

A detailed view of our procedurally generated environment.

Old Generation

A very detailed view of our procedurally generated environment.

New Generation

    Comparing the old generation to the new, the change is quite clear. Not just the visuals but the performance enhancements drastically reduced the time to load by over a factor of 10.

Researching Technologies

    The research UI and tech that accompanies it is still being worked on. A few major changes behind the scenes have taken effect so next month's dev blog will probably contain more information.

Sneak Peak

    Do you know what is being showcased below?

A sneak peak of to come information.

September Sneak Peak

    That's all for August's development update. Thanks for reading and if you have any suggestions on certain topics that you'd like to know more about, then head on over to our forums and let us know. You can also email our support at Support@digimasteredworks.com.

Roadmap

Milestones To Do:

  •  
    2022 Q3 - Development of core mechanics and game story
  •  
    2022 Q4 - Internal testing of core mechanics and Alpha testing
  •  
    2023 Q1 - Internal testing continued with review of core engine and mechanics
  •  
    2023 Q2 - Expansion of core features and Beta Testing
  •  
    2023 Q3 - Add enhancements from Beta Testing
  •  
    2023 Q4 - TBA

Milestones Completed:

  •  
    2021 Q1 - Initial designs and planning
  •  
    2021 Q2 - Initial designs and planning
  •  
    2021 Q3 - Initial designs and planning
  •  
    2021 Q4 - Development of core engine
  •  
    2022 Q1 - Development of core mechanics and game story
  •  
    2022 Q2 - Development of core mechanics and game story

SECRET

Approved for release: 08/31/22 ID: IB1014

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