The cruise drone works great now. It took some fixing and tweaking and so forth, especially to get ships to fly at warp-speed properly, but the bottom line is that now it works fine. I need still to enhance the AI for the traffic, transport and I guess NPC ships. It would be nice to somehow unify these a bit, but we shall see.... I should at any rate try and clear things up a bit, experiment, you know.
@p
Now might be the time for some useful optimizations. One thing that I think is starting to happen (maybe) is the GUI is actually cutting into the framerate a bit. This is mainly because, now that I have added traffic ships, there are lots of targets to keep track of. At any rate, planets that are very loaded up (i.e., cities, ships, organics, and monsters) are running pretty slow.
@p
So, if today I optimize and work a bit on ship AI in it's various flavours (in particular, making the ships respond to attacks properly, and tidying up any that might still be using old-versions of code, and just generally adding a bit more behaviour to them) and maybe do a bit of optimization too, that should do it...
2004-12-20