Month: April 2009

I’ve got a new ship added today, plus fixed some turret-related fun, and got the interface in for the race-selection screen, where you get to actually choose who to fight as (subject to unlocks). Small screenshot below:

Because that sort of thing isn’t as much fun as coding new weapon types or improving the visual effects, I might treat myself to improving some graphical stuff for the rest of the day. I’m looking forward to the time when all I have to do is balance the weapons and arrange basic ai fleets to fight against, but I suspect that it’s a long while to go yet.

I’ve been trying to avoid acting too much like a graphics junkie and getting some work done on the gamey stuff instead. I’ve put in difficulty levels today, and also made some decisions regarding what race of aliens the player controls.

The main part of the game currently has ten missions, basically defined by a certain backdrop, of a certain size (some maps are bigger than others) which some other variables such as nebula effects on shields etc. These levels also define the maximum fleet size (in ship and pilot terms) and which race the player fights against.

So today, each of these missions has three enemy fleets rather than one, the normal, hard and expert AI fleets, which are of differing sizes. Obviously the bigger fleets are harder :D. During combat, the enemy AI is the same as yours, so the difficulty comes purely from the force that is fielded against you. I may get around to the AI evolving its own fleets, but thats a whole can of worms.

There will be some ‘other stuff’ that will give the game longevity beyond those 3 fleets in 10 different missions, but I’m not talking about that stuff yet :D

The other thing decided today was that the player will fight the game as ‘the federation’ which is a ferengi inspired race whose backstory I’m still mulling over. Once you have beaten every mission on Normal, you will unlock the Rebels as a selectable playable race for each mission, beat them all on Hard and you unlock the Alliance, Beat them all of Expert, and you unlock the Empire. That’s the plan anyway. Any thoughts?

I’ve thought about the AI for Gratuitous Space Battles a lot. I have a lot of ideas, some of which I’ll sketch out, and some I’m keeping secret for now.

When I say ‘AI’ I’m being pretty nebulous. I don’t use AI in the trad comp-science limited sense of it. I’m talking about the whole matter of computer-controlled opponents. Who they are, how they are selected etc. Because GSB is a ‘hands-off’ battle game (for now), there is an element of determinism about how the battles work. In other words, if you design a fleet, in theory the AI can design one that it is assured of kicking your ass with.

There are many ways it could do this. The most obvious bruet force method is to randomly design fleets and pick the one that beats yours. Another would be to have some initial ‘seed’ fleets and do a genetic mutation – evolution algorithm to deduce the ultimate fleet against yours.

However, while I want a challenge, I don’t want you to be beaten every time. Plus, the ‘problem-space’ is colossal, way beyond chess, because there are maybe 40 hull designs, maybe 100 ship modules, near infinite combinations of ships and modules, and that’s before ship placement or ship-behavior/instructions. It’s not possible for the AI to beat your fleet using deep-blue style iteration of possibilities.

So there is a good chance the final AI will be some mixture of pre-designed (by me) AI fleets, combiend with an element of letting the AI battle several thousand slightly randomly mutated sample player fleets, and improving on my initial design.

I’m sure everyone has lots of ideas of where else to go with this, such as machine learning, copying player fleets etc. Needless to say, I’m mulling over them all :D