Ship AI!


So, I was able to get the ship AI working quite well. Lots of little bugs, including one physics bug that was rather surprisingly bad =) I fixed it anyhow.

@p The question now is what happens with these traffic drones in terms of combat and other interactions (hailing). I have partly envisioned a system where I could somehow unify the three levels of ships; that is to say, the NPC ships that wander the galaxy, the transport ships that fly between planets, and the traffic ships that just stay to the planets.

@p The easiest solution is to keep things working the way they work now; but somehow I just don't like this very much =) It is too confusing for the player. But what I can do is communicate the ships classifications to the player (icon types, target names) and keep things the same. Actually that is probably what I should do. The heterogeneity is really O.K.. Moreover, I may end up using special model generators for other types of ships, i.e., I might end up adding more different types of ships as well, so why go to the effort of unifying what is, really, different gameplay systems. If I want to make planet ships hailable, I can work that out independantly of the other ships. I can, at least, share the hailing code. The planet ships, when attacked, will just run to the nearest city and disappear. They won't fight back. They will give a different hailing message than the transport ships.

@p This makes the most sense. Because what happens when I add satellites? Won't I want to use a similar setup? Or if I had some kind of digirible class that just floats in the sky? Yes this makes sense.

2004-12-21


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