In the prior builds the stations would randomly shoot in 1 of 8 directions. I've revised the routines to do the following:
- station shots can travel in 32 different directions
- identify the pod closest to player
- randomly decide to shoot from that pod, as well as the 2 adjacent to it (the chance of firing is tied to the difficulty level and the sector you're in)
- each pod now has a unique cool down timer before it can shoot again (before it was 1 timer for the station as a whole). Cool down duration is tied to difficulty level and sector you're in.
- station shots can take out asteroids and mines (and the player earns points!)
- station shots are now slower than the player's ship
It took a few iterations to get this working, and I thought y'all might find the test builds interesting!
First off was the "closest pod to player" detection test.
draconian_20170613_closest_pod.bin
Then was direction to fire from the identified pod. Identified direction is drawn using a line of stationary shots, though they are still deadly. This showed a few issues such as if you attack from the bottom of the station the station preferred to shoot straight down, making it easy to hit an open core, while if you attack from the top the station preferred to shot at an angle, making it easy to take out the pods.
draconian_20170615_direction_test_2.bin
After a few iterations I go the targeting to work much better. In this build the line of stationary shots is no longer deadly as I extended the line.
draconian_20170617_direction_test_3.bin
While the routines are functional there's a few things I need to do before they're finalized:
- decide if the firing should be from the 2 pods closest to the player rather than 3 pods (the closest pod and it's neighbors). I'm leaning towards 2 pods as I often see one of the neighbors shooting slightly through the station.
- fine-tune the cool down timer
- fine-tune the random chance of firing
For Harmony or Stella (requires Stella 5.0.0-pre8 or newer)
draconian_20170617.bin
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