The fleet then figures out the average location of these neighbors, and moves forward more quickly along its orbit, but only if the average location is behind it. The effect is that fleets that are already at the front of a pack will pull forward, while other fleets will continue along their slower-paced orbits. That’s easy enough – just a distance check with some padding. The first order of business is for a fleet to get a list of neighbors that are too close for comfort. The calculations are also performed by each fleet independently, but designed so that effectively cooperative behavior emerges when all the fleets apply the same behavioral rules.
So, what’s actually involved in getting this behavior? While nothing here is terribly complex, there is a surprising number of pieces. The other day, encountering a particularly egregious case, I wrote a quick algorithm for the fleet AI to use to avoid overlapping other orbiting fleets as much as possible. This isn’t a huge problem in terms of game mechanics, but it’s still occasionally inconvenient and just messy to look at. The orbits of some well-to-do colonies can get quite crowded, with fleets overlapping each other and being difficult to pick out. In Starsector, fleets will often orbit a planet for some time – trade fleets offloading cargo, patrols preparing for duty, and so on. I will, of course, continue to write regular-style blog posts as well.
This blog post is a bit different than usual – instead of talking about a major new game mechanic, I’d like to instead take a quick – but in-depth – look at something relatively minor, but that I thought was interesting.
0 kommentar(er)
