I have finally fixed a few last minute bugs within the current system.
These were mostly related to combat, and to AI behaviours of various different AI types, etc, in the game.
There were also some issues with radar tracking when enemies were destroyed or removed from the game, and with some of the weapons being fired over long distances.
I am now in the final stage of testing of the current code.
I have uncovered quite a few bugs, including on in an unrelated system, but all of these have been fixed.
It seems that all of the core mechanics so far are working. There is quite a lot of polishing and improvements to be made in the future, but the system seems reasonably stable.
I now have a universe where the player and AI entities can travel, negotiate, and engage in combat at huge distances and fast speeds without any major issues.
This will provide a strong basis for building on in the future.
I have added a comms gui to the game. This allows for interaction with other NPC ships, and allows the player to negotiate, threaten, etc, during combat situations, as an alternative to escaping or fighting.
This gui also updates the player on the status of various ships, and displays requests from other ships for assistance, etc.
The next step is to finish the testing and finalising of the NPC AI code.
The AI is now, largely done. I will spend another week or so on this, I want to do a lot of testing and cleaning up of the code, as well as add some other minor improvements.
This system is quite complex, and there are several features that need to be tested extensively before I can move on.
I also want to add the ability for the player to communicate with other NPC ships, and trade, negotiate, etc, and have the AI respond to those requests.
Most of the issues with the AI NPC’s are now fixed.
There are still a few minor bugs, but I am making progress on fixing these too.
I now have quite a powerful system that allow for NPC and player movement at extremely long ranges and extremely fast speeds. This will be the basis for much more advanced features in the future.
I have also improved the radar and navigation systems in the game to take into account these changes. It is now possible to set the range of the radar to isolate objects at various ranges, to make searching and tracking much easier.
I am continuing to improve the AI system.
I have made several improvements, and fixed several bugs, with the current AI system.
The AI can now reliably intercept, and chase, attack, and retreat, from players regardless of the distance and speeds involved.
The next step is to add support for NPC ships, and add interactions between them. I want the AI to be able to attack and chase certain NPC’s etc, as well.
This will require some reasonably extensive changes to the existing system.
The AI work is going well.
I still have a lot of refactoring to do, but the testing that I have done so far has not uncovered any major problems.
I have also added random AI ships to the project which can be tracked and intercepted by the player. This, again, seems to work fine.
The next step is to add some more functionality to the system, including more random AI types. I will then spend several weeks testing and debugging this to make sure that the core mechanics are working properly.
This system is quite simple at the moment, but the goal is to get the core mechanics working before adding anything more complex.
The next major goal is to test, and improve, the AI Ships that can spawn at various times.
I have spent some time testing this already, and the solution that I have works reasonably well, but it is very rough, and can no doubt be improve a lot.
I also want to add support for various AI trade ships and other types of ships that might be in the scene.
The preliminary testing has gone well, and there are no obvious issues, but I will probably spend several weeks on this.
I have made improvements to the lighting used in my project.
I am using a combination of directional and point lights, and the background colour changes depending on the colour of the nebula that the player is in.
I have spend some time adding and customising various light sources, and setting the layers and exclusion masks for each one.
I was able to exclude the nebula lights from shining on planets and the interior of the ship, and get them to only cast light through the windows, which is a very nice looking effect.
I also have a white light which I have now set up to only light up planets and other parts of the scene that should not appear to be coloured by the nebula light. This light does not illuminate the interior.
The interior objects, crew members, etc, are all lit only by point lights.
There are still some minor issues to solve, mainly to do with aura lighting and light rays, etc, but this system works very well.
I have finished the integration for the Phillips HUE lighting.
The system works quite well, although it needs some slight tweaking in some areas.
I can sync the lights with the sunlight, and the nebula light colour, this is the easy part.
I have also added a distance-based system that will change the light colour based on the colour of the light that the player is closest to.
I have also added various effects like fade, flicker, strobe, etc, and I have added Lightning, Aurora, and Fire light settings.
This has made a huge difference in the immersion for the project, and I am interested in looking into other options like this in the future.