In between engine updates I have started work on basic path-finding for the AI. It can get a little frustrating juggling vectors in 3D but I have already created an auto-targeting function for ship turrets.
I'm also close to finishing the waypointing AI ships will use to travel between destinations. It works much the same as the turret function except it treats Earth as the "ship" and the ship as a turret mounted on its surface. I'm sketching out an AI Overseer function for controlling battles. This function will compile a database of all ships in the current session, their positions, their relative distances between each other, their health in terms of how many salvos from each ship it would take to destroy them, etc so that ships can decide who best to attack first or, if necessary, flee.
Sounds awesome m8. doing an amazing job and I'm looking forward to seeing the complete game, been following this for a while now. How long do you plan on focusing on AI for?