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Tinker Tuesday for September 9, 2024

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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HighSpace

Goals for last week were:

  • Fix bugs introduced in this week

- Something weird happens when a friendly ship gets shot down causing a crash.

- Shooting down a ship does not remove it from the list of active AIs (which is why the debug aggro information is still shown after the mission, in the video above).

Fixed, and fixed. The second one was trivial, the turned out to be a faulty team-membership check resulting the AIs increasing aggro of the just destroyed friendly ship. Since the ship is completely removed from the game state, when the AIs try to chase it, they run into a null pointer, and the game crashes.

  • Reinforcement mechanics

I run into a few bugs trying to set it up, so I didn't get as far as I wanted, but I made decent progress! On an unrelated note I'm considering uploading the gameplay clips somewhere, because the file size limits on The Motte are too strict to upload anythig longer, so the end result is that it's hard tell what's going on. So to recap, from previous week we had these:

  • Player fleet approaching the enemy. There's a constant aggro factor of 50, while the final level increases as the ship approaches. When the fleet splits, the split-off Alpha wing inherits the aggro, and is detected as the ship AI should target, as it's the closest.
  • After the battle. Upon successfully destroying the enemy cruiser, Alpha wing's constant aggro factor gets increased to 60.

We take a similar setup, when the player's capital ship is parked outside, and the fighter wing heads out to meet the enemy. Because the cap-ship is within range (currently set to something ridiculous like 1 AU) it's visible in the in-mission "reinforcements" menu. From there it can be called in to join the battle. The most basic functionality works! It's not finished though. The ship is not removed from the menu after joining the battle. There's no consideration of the ship's distance from the battlefield, so it's available instantly, and it's not added to the in-mission game state, so you can't select it from the tactical view and give it commands. There's going to be a bunch of things I haven't considered, like making some moves illegal.

I did not manage to get to these at all :

  • See if there's any low-hanging fruit to make the AI more interesting.
  • More annotations / code refactoring

This week:

I have absolutely no chance to get anything done this week. This might turn out to be a busy month, but I hope I can get some work in every other week. If I manage to find some time, currently the next goal is to finish the reinforcement mechanics.