Hey everyone!

I don't have a very image filled entry for you guys today, but I think I'm going to talk about how the AI system is going to work for the game. I say "going to work" because I haven't actually started coding any of the actual AI code, but I did have AI in mind when I coded the core engine, so it's going to be easy to interface the game with the AI. Anyways.....

The AI for the game (in the space battles at least), is a multi-tiered structure.

Top Tier: Fleet Commander(or something cooler sounding than that)
This part of the AI looks at the map as a whole, and is able to set "objectives" for the ships in his fleet. The Commander class has access to all the maps terrain (for pathfinding), but he can't see ships past the fog of war, so the AI is as much in the dark as you are at the beginning of a battle. The Commander also has access to a variety of influence maps, which can be affected by many things such as the number of friendly ships that have died in an area, allowing the Commander to give his ships the "objective" of staying clear of that obvious killzone. The Commander doesn't have any direct control over the ships, but it can give the ships "suggestions" on their course of action (such as "progressively move the the right of the map", or "Hold Position and await further orders"). The final authority on the movement of ships comes from the next lower teir....

Bottom Tier: Ship Captain(Yeah, I couldn't think of anything better than that)
This level of AI is responsible for actually moving the ships around and attacking other ships. The Captain's look at mainly local conditions and targets, and try to make the best decision based on the "objectives" given to it by the Commander. Although if there is an especially good move that contradicts the Commanders orders (such the chance to disable an enemy capital ship when the Commander orders a retreat), the Ship level AI will deviate from the orders, but not to a great extent, so you still get the feeling of a centralized control structure.

Anyways, thats pretty much a dump of my plans for implementing the AI for Axis Shift (I finally gave in to the name). Sorry if theres grammatical errors and incomplete sentences, but I felt it would be beneficial for me to type out my ideas and see what you guys think, so feel free to hammer at my ideas (as long as you have some constuctive criticism).

I was hoping Mark had uploaded some pretty new piece of artwork to our server before he left town (Spring Break for us), but it would seem he didn't, so I'll just have to show you guys the reworked minimenus with Mark's new button textures... I know its not much, but come on, it's Spring Break[grin]



Well, thats all for now, and remember, we welcome any feedback (and we long for human contact......)[grin]