Hello!
Warp drive is an underrated feature in Infinity: Battlescape. Utilized to its fullest, it has the potential to expand the area players and AIs fight in from around stations to actually encompassing the planetary system. One of reasons that is yet to happen seems to be in how AIs aren’t using warp drive to travel freely, not even in combat. As a result, they need to be spawned at battles, which limits examples of flight for players to learn from, and advanced interactions like rallying, reinforcements, interdicts, get blocked for AIs completely. It’s related to inherent problems of how AI movement calculation, warp drive speed function, even netcode, interact together.
Now, with Mission Runtime’s features, path is open for experiments! ![]()
This topic is for sharing and discussing these exactly, as well as general ideas related to the topic of IB’s AI ships attempting warp flight. No promises. More like experiments to see how or if things can work.
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To begin, check out a simple scenario with a corvette follower:
The script. Put it in the Workshop folder:
Warp hops AI scenario.rar (3.1 KB)
The scenario demonstrates how ship AI has an overshot problem by setting a corvette on a path. Path is premade with CreatePath, matched with waypoints one to one, intentionally dips closer to planet. I have added “Range” attributes, wondering if they would work, but looks like no. As a result, corvette overshoots waypoints more often, mainly because it starts braking too late.
Basic solution is made using MoveAI. Code is taken from Training, and modified to have destination distance scaled with corvette’s approach relative speed. It’s imprecise, and still works, mainly because part of braking is already implemented into MoveAI. This solution resembles an approach players very likely have, with speed limits being related to distance… aaand as a result, has similar errors too ![]()
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Such simplicity can be beneficial for a while. When players attempt formation flight, they have trouble managing relative speeds with current warp drives — these have no cooperation, no reference frame to share, so it becomes fine to get separated and rally at slow speed near destination. This is what AIs might be able to mimic. It is worth exploring for at least making battlescapes more lively, and better yet, I suspect there are ways to implement combat at high speeds later on. Hey, Warp Jam was one such example already!
Most likely, next thing to try would be in automating autonomous warp activation, as for now that racer corvette’s warp drive is initiated by a custom function. Though again, no promises.