Time flies like an arrow, bot flies like a banana

4 years ago by IC Rainbow

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Most of the effort was spent on giving the bots more reasonable-looking behaviour instead of previous clockwork senselessness. They are competent traders now and can fly around the intro planet pretty good. Alas, in a chaotic multiplanetary environment good decision making is beyond my abilities to give them capabilities. But what they lack in skill they compensate with perseverance, relying upon planned goals, so il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.

I had to dive into trajectory projection and turn it inside out. Now the trajectory is calculated into end of time or landing, whichever comes first, but only once. Applying thrust forces its update, but no more reprojecting with every tick. Trajectories (and traces) deal with fine changes in position and rendering previously issued sub-pixel line segments. No more. With compression folds applied to paths the game can store less and draw more, greatly extending projection range available. Additional care is taken not to overdraw circular orbits which are now a thing.

A new scene, “Observation Lounge” were conductive to implementing all those things. One can now take a back seat and enjoy the scenery. The system will even give you a guided tour. As always, this opens up new fascinating improvement tracks for next updates.

Finally, done

Bots doing something sane

Unexpected delivery

Observation lounge scene
Headless benchmarks

Almost there

Tutorial scene
- Single planet
- No bots
- Optionally, local multiplayer
  - Sets the stage for “race” game mode
“Experiment” scenes (interactive visualizations)
- Gravity fields rendering
  - Currently lives in a separate branch
- Bot gym