Hello!
The monster (not soldier) AI has been a matter of extreme difficulty to me throughout this project; I have literally re-written it from the ground up about five times. The point is I want these monsters be so disturbing, so horrifying that they will scare people out of their wits! It is always dissapointing when you play a game (ahem FarCry) that has intelligent soldier AI and then you get to the bit with monsters and they are underwhelming creatures with "run at you screaming" AI.
One small but very important part of a free roaming monster AI is its navigation around the level. Using bouncing ball movement just doesn't cut it for enclosed spaces- it makes it very unlikely that monsters will enter a doorway for example because they are more likely to just bounce off the wall next to it.
So I have implemented a node based nav system which directs the monsters around the level in a random but guided fashion. This means that monsters have much more freedom to move around the level and are hence the player never knows where he might cross paths with one.
Here's a link to a video demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Pw3enJm-aA
The monsters don't actually look like red blobs- I'm going to keep the monster's appearance and key aspects of their behaviour strictly under wraps- no screenshots or anything! This is so people won't know whats coming when they play the game. Yeah I 've shown screenies of the spiders... but everyone knows what a spider looks like.
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ben mercer 
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