Originally released Aug 20th 2018

Something more than a week ago, I made a post on how I would add bot support to Space Wars: Ship Battles, and I have been silent ever since. This might have led you to think I abandoned this project, but that’s not the case. I have been busy implementing the bots, but have encountered quite some problems. So here are some things I have encountered.

Navmesh not working

In my post I talked about that it would be much easier because I was using unity, and that has the Navmesh which handles the pathfinding for the bots, but it didn’t work. So I actually had to implement A*, and it was buggy as hell, so (after a few days) I switched back to the Navmesh, and it worked.

Teleporter not working

As you might know, the way for players to move between ships is to walk into a teleporter, but bots didn’t like that. What I tried was to tell the bots:

if you are on your own ship, and you want to attack, then move to the teleporter, and if you are on the enemy ship and want to attack, then walk between waypoints (this is just temporary)

But it didn’t work, so I replaced the teleporter with some weird tunnel between the ships, and then removed the code for telling the bot to first walk to the teleporter and made it so it would just walk to the waypoints, and that worked. I then removed the weird tunnel, but made it so that the bots still think it exists, while it actually walks into the teleporter (which is on the path between the ships), and it just teleports to the enemy ship, and then walks between waypoints.

So this is what I’ve been busy with over the past week and a half.