Spirit: I've been looking at spawning formations, and I think I can get the spawning to work in a week or two.
But I have a major issue: I can spawn the ships in their place, but I cannot get them to behave as formations. I guess that's your area: AI. Is there a way in which you'd prefer to handle that?
I was thinking that each ship could belong to a group, and each group would belong to a greater group - a hierarchy, like this:
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BB group:
Main section
1 Battleship w/ 12 light/med fighters
1 Carrier w/ 12 light fighters, 8 med/heavy fighters, 8 bombers
2 Cruisers w/ 4 light fighters each
Destroyer group: 12 Destroyers w/o fighter escort
Group 1: 3 destroyers
Group 2: 3 destroyers
Group 3: 3 destroyers
Group 4: 3 destroyers
Fighters (spanwed from ships)
Close escort - some ships
Vanguard
Patrols
(Fighter numbers are made up, I have no idea what they could be - I'll need some numbers later when the framework is in place)
So, each destroyer group would have a relative position to mantain with respect to the main ships, and their task would be to protect the main ships. The close escort would mantain position close the the big ships, and would protect them (like the destroyers), but the vanguard would go ahead and scout for trouble before the fleet engages the SPEC drive (which means trouble since they must power down the shields), and the patrols would have to go in circles (or in some pattern) far away from the main group to intercept incoming hostiles.
That would be one kind of formation (there would be several).
Now... can you make the AI do all that? (or at least some of that, the least being making them mantain their position relative to each other, and the escorts should break and engage incoming hostiles).
Now, I was thinking of attaching a "role" to each group, and pass it to some AI setup function that, based on the "role", would give propper orders. So, if you get that a destroyer group X, has an "escort" role with target group Y, where Y is the BB group's main section, you would set up the propper AI for that.
To sum up: I can make the spawning take place, and provide a callback where you would have to set up the AI. The callback would receive two groups: the group which has to be set up, its target, a role and possibly some parameters for that role. Now, the role could involve protecting the target, following it, or even attacking it (why not). There would be many roles.
Alternatively, I could call different functions depending on the role. So, instead of a single callback, a
setupVanguard()
setupCapshipEscort()
setupFighterEscort()
setupFighterPatrol()
etc...
What do you think?
