Wind Tempest wrote:Could you make the AIs for allied ships in Leviathan, Grinder, Raid and Sandbox as effective as they are in Blockade? That would be wonderful.
Grargh? I spawned a Waverider, two ally Scalpels, and four ally Slivers. Two Slivers and one Scalpel decided to chill and play hacky-sack (or pass around the bong, or talk about the space weather, or whatever it is ships do in groups when they're not hunting and shooting) over by the station while my other three ally ships were screaming all over the map with gusto putting railgun shot, blaster fire, and ER mining lasers into anything that wasn't each other, my Waverider, or the civvies. At least they did help defend the station with the occasional railgun bolt, flak burst, or nanomatrix beam.
Speaking of AI, a feature I just thought of for sandbox mode: Choice to disable the AI for enemy ships, and make them controllable. THat way you could theoretically have 2-player battles.
The AI does seem a little lazy in cases. they wait for ships to come into range.
Make a gun with 2000 range and you can just vape the AI without it moving
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upon reading this:
50% of people will have scrolled up
25% will have looked at their ceiling
The last 25% can now feel smug because everyone else has taken orders from a little sig box.
The AI for allied and enemy forces is definately different. Try putting an allied Cronus against an enemy one; the allied will win almost every time because it will shoot straight for the core, while the enemy tries to blow off side pieces.
I wonder if this had any affect on the custom ship tourney...
"That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die." - H.P. Lovecraft
GameMaker question: Does GameMaker support taking info from an .xml file? I'm learning C# (My computer stinks and I can't use XNA studios =C so I'm learning C# in the meanwhile), and C# can take variables from an XML file rather easily (lot easier than I thought). I was thinking perhaps one would save custom weapon stats to XML files then the ShipMaker would load them. (Not sure how to edit the XML file though, but that really doesn't matter as of right now: edit the XML independently then import it into the game.
Da_Higg wrote:The AI does seem a little lazy in cases. they wait for ships to come into range.
Make a gun with 2000 range and you can just vape the AI without it moving
What it needs are seperate Target Acquisition and Preferred Engagement ranges. A Hestia might have a Target Acquisition range of 700, and a Preferred Engagement range of 350. If it detects an enemy within 700, it will close to it's preferred engagement range (ie, 350) and then attack. Simple enough in concept. If an enemy closes within the Preferred Engagement range, the Hestia tries to move back to keep the enemy at the Preferred Engagement range. Likewise if it starts running away, the Hestia will follow without being given a specific attack order.
The problem is it romoves the whole micromanagement thimg this ga,e has going
Look Up
upon reading this:
50% of people will have scrolled up
25% will have looked at their ceiling
The last 25% can now feel smug because everyone else has taken orders from a little sig box.
Da_Higg wrote:The problem is it romoves the whole micromanagement thimg this ga,e has going
You could optionally add a Hold Position command, under which a ship would not move to engage enemies within it's Target Acquisition area, but will attempt to face them. Make it kick in if you specifically order a ship to stop (ie, hitting S when your ship is at a standstill) rather than as soon as the ship stops and there you go.
Besides, you can still micro the use of your ships most of the time.
Let's put it this way, Gamemaker's built in ini file handling system is the cause for all that pain about ini files being created in strange places. I had to use a user made GM extension to handle ini files. While the same extension probably exists for xml, GM doesn't support it by default. C#'s built in compatibility with xml is one of the foundations that the language was built it. It's a little hard to compete with that!
As for AI targeting range, there is a hard cap of 1000 range on the AI. While it can be increased, it would hurt performance when there are a lot of ships in play and this limitation is consciously applied to the career and raid mode. However, there is a system to make the AI hunt ships regardless of their position which I'll probably put into the sandbox.
Finally, I know it's been some time (relatively) since the last release. I've been busy with various things lately, but I do have a bugfix version (0.79g) that I'll probably release soon.
Sean 'th15' Chan
[img]http://img63.imageshack.us/img63/6344/bfbanner2vy5.gif[/img]
th15 wrote:C#'s built in compatibility with xml is one of the foundations that the language was built it. It's a little hard to compete with that!
Ahh... I should read the 'introduction to C#' more carefully next time.
EDIT: Wow. Quite a few posts missing here. Regardless,
Request for new/edited feature:
PD will automatically start at "intercept mode off". This is so that AI can use it to hit ships.
In addition, PD will still hit shots at either intercept mode on or off, except in intercept mode on, the PD will try to fire at projectiles exclusively (if there are no projectiles it'll go back to hitting ships).
It was one of the posts that got lost (the change log I mean)
Look Up
upon reading this:
50% of people will have scrolled up
25% will have looked at their ceiling
The last 25% can now feel smug because everyone else has taken orders from a little sig box.
I think there was a max deflector flash size limit
Look Up
upon reading this:
50% of people will have scrolled up
25% will have looked at their ceiling
The last 25% can now feel smug because everyone else has taken orders from a little sig box.
Development has stalled a little bit as I'm learning PHP now to re-write the highscore and ship database stuff myself (right now it's just a script I ripped off somewhere), sooo don't be surprised at the relatively lean changelog now:
v0.80
-Fixed bug where GUI arrows would appear in the wrong place while scrolling
-GUI arrows will now fade over time if they remain on-screen
-Blasters no longer create shrapnel. Damage increased from 12 to 17 again. The bits of shrapnel just weren't working out as I wanted them to.
-Fixed a bug that occured with ships with more Deflectors than sections
-Removed some superflous code in the ship and section initialization
-Implemented new highscore upload system. Should be less glitchy.
The new highscore upload system is the client side stuff. Basically the game now opens the highscore webpage within the game instead of having to launch your browser for it (which was rather glitchy).
However, you'll probably be interested to know that I've been working on getting an encounter maker into the game. I'll be realistic and say that if it works in the end it'll be pretty simple, just something to allow you to plonk some ships (including custom ships) down and fight it out.
Sean 'th15' Chan
[img]http://img63.imageshack.us/img63/6344/bfbanner2vy5.gif[/img]
