Just wanted to touch base and let everyone know this is still getting worked towards!

Right now the big chunk of work that I'm taking on is actually research, I'm looking into GOAP (Goal Oriented Action Planning)

It's an older alternative to Behavior Trees, GOAP was first popularized and used in F.E.A.R.

It's an incredibly interesting approach to AI, allowing a planner to select actions working backward from an assigned goal. So writing a planner, and then figuring out a good set of actions to bring the system in parity with the current AI is the first step to see if this has any use. If it does then extending both the variety of goals and actions could be a great step forward.

Currently, using behavior trees could get pretty cumbersome pretty rapidly, though they still may be the way to go. But if I can leverage GOAP and make it compatible with the concepts I have for a combat manager, then that could really open up some runway for how fights actually play out.

My next substantial post will hopefully have some tangible progress on that front! Thanks for your interest and patience!

Dan