Oolite Bulletins

A while back I ran across a mining ship using its mining laser on asteroids and mining the pieces. I sort of followed him around and just to be a jerk, I would shoot the splinters just before he got to them. I thought he might "get mad" and attack me.

He didn't, but once after a Thargoid attack at a station I went around scooping the now dormant robot fighters, and noticed another ship doing the same. he and I were competing for the last few of the fighters. I used my injectors to get to each of them before him, and he did end up attacking me immediately afterwards! Well, he was an offender, so maybe he would have anyway.

Commodore Sics D'fore wrote:

A while back I ran across a mining ship using its mining laser on asteroids and mining the pieces. I sort of followed him around and just to be a jerk, I would shoot the splinters just before he got to them. I thought he might "get mad" and attack me.

Very healthy passtime, that one!

Would need a sophisticated AI to take that sort of situations into account, though...

Yeah, I kind of figured that it was unlikely that the AI would really be that complex.


Hmmm. Could I use the word "mining" a few more times in that sentence? I meant to say, "scooping the pieces". Oh well.

Actually, I think implementing that particular flavor of AI behavior would be relatively trivial. Take a cue from MMORPGs and give each active AI and possible action an "aggro" value. The more aggro an AI accumulates, the higher priority they give that target. Certain actions generate aggro, or hate if you prefer. Firing on someone, obviously, would generate lots of aggro. In this case, destroying something an AI was intent on destroying (killstealing) or scooping might generate a little, unless they'd called for help or were a GalCop targeting an offender you'd destroyed.

I'm not up on the Oolite source, so some logic of this sort might already be present in Oolite's AI target prioritizing, but it's an interesting thought, and could make the AI's behavior more nuanced.

Hmmm. I am not a programmer of any kind, myself, but that makes sense to me.

Along the same lines, I always thought it would be nice if you fired very close to a ship, but missed, that the ship would actually realize it was being attacked and respond accordingly. It seems kind of funny that they would not move at all until you actually hit them.

Commodore Sics D'fore wrote:

Along the same lines, I always thought it would be nice if you fired very close to a ship, but missed, that the ship would actually realize it was being attacked and respond accordingly. It seems kind of funny that they would not move at all until you actually hit them.

Of course, they’d only know if the beam passed through their field of view through their current viewport. ;-)

I notice that you can take out a big cruiser and the escorts do bugger all unless you shoot at them sometimes!