Adding AI - sentience optional
Adding AI is an odd task. There's no real upper limit - you can just keep going and thinking and improving as long as your target hardware has the power to run it. There's also no clear textbook solution, with any number of possible solutions being open for consideration. It's certainly satisfying as a task of problem-solving, and seeing ways to describe the game universe in numbers the computer understands. One has to ensure one doesn't aim too far though. Total sentient virtual combatants may make for a thrilling challenge in game, but that'd also mean never actually releasing anything...
I've had a couple of epiphanies today on ways to model the AI to make it pretty compelling. Years of Star Control experience means I know how to fly a ship and I think I can distil the basics down to rules that'll work in ionAXXIA. I hope these lead to a good solution over the next few days and I don't get bogged down with chasing workable solutions. Where the problem-solving is satisfying, the iterations over buggy code can get real tiresome real quick!
