Week 32: New character-behavior and spawn-position systems

I made editor icons for the behavior nodes:
follow, collide, run-away,
climb-adjacent-surfaces, move-back-and-forth, jump-back-and-forth, wander

tl;dr: Last week I implemented a new character-behavior system, and a new character-spawn-position system.

What happened last week?

Highlights

• I implemented the new character-behavior system.
• I created a new character-spawn-position system.

Laundry list

• Implement character-behavior system:
• Add a new standard _on_navigation_ended method to BehaviorControllers.
• Implement a lot more navigation-related logic in BehaviorControllers.
• Add BehaviorController logic for triggering, pausing, and transitioning-to-the-next-behavior-controller.
• Update behavior-controller finish and pause logic.
• Refactor MoveBackAndForthBehaviorController and UserNavigationBehaviorController to fit the new patterns.
• Remove Behavior._on_player_ready event.
• Update behavior-controller logic relating to returning-to-starting-surface and first-surface-attachment.
• Add a new ChoreographyBehaviorController.
• Remove the separate concept of PlayerBehaviorType.
• Add standard error-handling for failing navigation in BehaviorControllers.
• Add support for querying BehaviorControllers by name.
• Add support for configuring whether to return to the original start position or just the position before this behavior.
• Rename "behavior controller" to "behavior".
• Fix issues relating to the setup of ReturnBehavior.
• Fix issues relating to the setup of RunAwayBehavior and CollideBehavior.
• Update behavior-controllers to consider current and behavior-start surfaces/positions rather than player-start surfaces/positions.
• Fix issues with ReturnBehavior position.
• Fix an issue with when the default behavior is activated.
• Add support for continuing to run after first nav in run-away-behavior.
• Update Behaviors to update start position/surface during each move, and to use these more-accurate values instead of other state from the player instance.
• Implement FollowBehavior.
• Add support for distinguishing between max-distance-from-player-start-position vs max-distance-from-behavior-start-position.
• Add support for handling reached-max-distance events differently than navigation-failed events.
• Update duckling to use new FollowBehavior.

• Fixed some bugs in CollideBehavior.

• Fixed a bug with initially activating the default behavior.

• Create and use a standard SpawnPosition system.
• Update level-logic to use default player creation according to SpawnPositions.
• Add support for configuring surface-side attachment with SpawnPosition.
• Add support for configuring surface-attachment when adding players to a level.
• Add initial-surface-attachment calculations for SurfacerPlayer.
• Add a hacky work-around in SpawnPosition, so that it doesn’t reference MovementParameters.
• SpawnPosition is in Scaffolder.
• Scaffolder shouldn’t reference anything in Surfacer.
• SpawnPosition supports optionally specifying the surface-attachment direction, which depends on surfacey stuff.
• I should probably instead sub-class SpawnPosition in Surfacer and only include the surfacey bits in that sub-class, but I don’t have the time at the moment.
• Rename MovementParams to MovementParameters.
• Move Time inner-classes out into separate files.

• Add support for excluding or exclusively-including each SpawnPosition.

• This makes quick debugging much easier!

Now each player is configured in a level with the new SpawnPosition.
SpawnPosition shows information like the character's initial surface-attachment direction, or whether the player should temporarily be excluded or exclusively included.

• Brainstorm better approaches to finding a path to a given point.
• I used to just care about finding the nearest position-along-a-surface.
• I now care about finding the nearest position-along-a-surface that is also reachable.
• And I also now care about whether the character would be able to return back to their starting position.
• Refactor squirrel-away to run as an addon.
• This means that Squirrel Away can no longer run on its own.
• It instead must be run within the addons/ folder of a separate project.
• This makes it a little more convoluted to run on its own.
• But this makes it easy to also update Squirrel Away source code when making framework changes from another project.
• But this will make it a lot easier to keep Squirrel Away up-to-date with the latest framework changes!
• Update READMEs.
• Update export configurations.
• Rename some common file/class names, so they don't conflict with those in other apps.
• Refactor player event-logging.
• Standardize pre-existing logging statements, so that they go through the standard player log system, and are easily configurable.
• Add export-property grouping for player logs properties.
• Use more warning logs.
• Add support for configuring whether additional types of framework events are logged.
• Add more timestamps to logs.
• Create a utility for padding a string with spaces.
• Add log statements when entering/exiting proximity/collision.
• Rename things:
• Rename “player” to “character” throughout the codebase.
• Rename "computer character" to "npc" throughout the codebase.
• Rename "human character" to "player character" throughout the codebase.
• Rename "user" to "player" in some places.
• Miscellaneous:
• Create and use a new utility for translating vectors to strings with a given number of significant decimal places.
• Move some additional navigation state into PlayerNavigationState.
• Add some additional navigation-state logic for tracking when a state flag just changed.
• Add support for seeding the random number generator.
• Add support for configuring a base_path value for file paths across the app.
• Fix recent-movement-setting save-state.
• Add support for toggling NPC navigation annotations in settings.
• Remove support for auto-exclamation-marks on each new nav.
• Lost almost an entire day dealing with Google bricking my Pixel 3 phone with their latest OS update.

What's next?

• This week I'll spend most of my time finishing the behavior controller system.
• There are still a lot of little things to add!

🎉 Cheers!