AI progress news

It's Alive!

So no update in a while, things have been very busy recently and Blitz has had to take a back seat. In spite of there being now news, progress has been fairly decent. The main focus has been sorting out the AI and frankly it was a colossal mess!

The new code has completely destroyed the old scripts. I had hoped to add a few cool extras but keep the basics intact. Instead the whole thing has been re-written. As if that wasn't bad enough the old ZH code has a lot of weird bugs and idiosyncrasies in it which have been frustrating and ended up requiring a lot of trial and error to work around.

The good news is all these problems have been overcome - The AI lives!

The current state is actually still incomplete. The only working faction is currently the Soviets and it needs scripts added to make it use aircraft. Sadly the scope for interesting AI playstyles is limited by clunky code. Still, it's a bit more interesting than the old AI which basically just rushed your base with repeated attack waves. The new AI will try to occupy the midfield before it sends attack waves in. It should also scale better on different difficulty settings. The easy AI is quite passive if you just turtle.

There's still quite a laundry list of things to do. After the Soviets are finalised the scripts need to be duplicated and modified to work for the other factions.
I also need to update the unit skins to boost their contrast. Some are done but not all.
There's a lot of broken tooltips
Cameos need updating
Finally the factories need to be differentiated better so some kind of reskin is in order.
Also it would be nice to boost the look of the soviet buildings, they need to be weathered and also the roof textures are fairly bad.

More to come soon!