This week I’ve been fiddling around with artificial intelligence. Actually, that’s a lie - I’ve really been fiddling around with an artificial intelligence interface. I’ll be using Lua for the actual AI, which means that the enemies (and friendlies) will all have their brains spread wide for you to meddle with, if you feel like.

I’ve also been playing around with reducing things graphically to speed up the game. For instance, I’ve changed the way the water is drawn, but it doesn’t look significantly different from the other screenshots. The main thing there was reducing the texture resolution; the altitude of the camera means that we just don’t need high-res water. I’ve also reduced the number of polygons in nearly all the models, which has given me quite a boost. I’m almost up to sixty frames per second now, but then I’m using an Athlon 64×2 6000+ and a NVidia 8800GT. Hopefully it’ll make things smoother on everybody else’s computers too.

I’ve been thinking about the next release, too. I’ve written an online update/launcher program (originally for Target; 2008!) which I’ll be attaching to this project sooner or later, but I’m not sure the next release is the right time for it. I’ve also been thinking about how useful a little bit of ‘phoning home’ would be. It’s difficult to get real details on hardware and performance from forums and blogs (especially when you’re not sure how many - if any - people are reading in the first place), and so I don’t really know if my optimisation efforts are having much effect. The only other system I can test on is an older one with a 6600GT graphics card, but that’s still a little higher-end than I’m hoping to reach. (My third system is an Asus EeePC. The only way this game’ll ever work on that is if I render out all the graphics and turn it back into a sprite game.) Unfortunately a lot of people are not big fans of such things. Ho hum.