Issues with AI 2: Electric Boogaloo

Author: Adam Toly

I once again worked on the AI and once again had a lot of trouble.  Specifically, I worked on making controllable units for the player to command. This led to me working very heavily on the groundwork for a control system that can manage all the various commands needed for the game. The primary issue with this is that the control systems for the game were not designed by me, leading me on a wild goose chase across our codebase to find the needed information for the commands. The second issue was that we needed a queue system for commands, and for some unknown reason, I used Unreal's TQueue instead of TArray, causing many code breaks and crashes.

The first issue led me to better acquaint myself with other portions of our codebase, and it only took time to overcome. The second issue took me hours to fix. The only thing the debugger would tell me was either a null pointer error or that the object's name was "Illegal name". I tried a lot of things, from checking for null pointers and whatever "Illegal name" to limiting how many commands could be queued, and although the null pointers did get blocked, I was still getting illegal names. I then looked into what causes this error and found out it happens when an Unreal object is either deleted or prepped for deletion. This was fixed by simply using an array instead of a queue. Still, even though it took a while to get to work, some of the things I used just to prevent the error were usable functionality we needed, so it wasn't the worst.