2011-09-25 11:28
Another Tweak on the AI
Beside the Auto-Update Capability we're currently implementing the Enemy-AI.
We want the AI to be a believable Enemy - one which reacts on different situations like a player would do.
At the current stage we had some constraints on building structures so some structures needed to be builded directly next to a defined other structure.
That is a nice feature for the game itself because it tightens up the building progress - on the other hand it is far more complicated to implement an AI which is capable of "understanding" that. This Problem goes Hand in Hand with the not-really-grid-aligned Building Process.
The Asteroid is of a non-uniform-shape so there is no real grid and it needs quite a lot of afford to calculate the place for a structure which serves best for other structures.
At the moment, the AI can build on its own - pretty fine as well - but when it comes to do some logic in sense of "where is enough room to place a structure which can host the max amount of neighbours" we start to struggle..
So unfortunately we will drop this one feature - no structure will have a constrain that forces another structure as neighbour.
Another drawback would be, that we need to find some way in preserving some needs. In Case of Living Quarters for example, we need some type of live-support. Currently the Quarters need to be connected to an Life-Support Structure which means, every of them can support up to 6 Quarters.
If we drop that constrain, we need some sort of "Available Life Support" - i have to admit, that the constrain-to-neighbor was a much eleganter solution for that problem.
Currently there are also structures which need to be build on ground and therefore will be a dead end - such structures are the hangar entries, rocket silos and the drills.
Because they need to be on the ground, there is no Transit Node where other structures can be connected to.
The AI currently respects that but we need to make sure, that the AI will not lock itself by not leaving available Transit Nodes.
But there is good progress with that so i am confident ;-)
Beside the AI we implement the needed Auto-Update-Capabilities, before that we will not be able to publish the first Alpha Version.
So be patient and stay informed :-)
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