The default AI in the subject game left many who fought against it wanting more challenge, as it was, to put it bluntly, limited. Now I was member of the online community, obviously an anon to protect myself from the risks it could present. I had enough experience building in this game to describe my own/others’ building process in detail. There was some scope which functional building creativity could reach in some legible manner. Enough connectable dots for an AI.
Advanced AI was simply a hobby project to enhance the experience of playing against that AI. It basically takes the modular design of the vehicle and learns from it’s placement of key details, then tries to drive it in a coherent matter, regardless of absurdity, to accomplish tasks that it might have been intended for. It could do all the same things the vanilla AI could do, but also what the vanilla AI used to do as well as scavenge and self-repair, with some level of survival nature knowing it could be destroyed any time and it should take steps to avoid that fate.
It started as a simple land vehicle AI mod, but as an enhancement, flying AI was also a target.
Of course, there was no flying AI present in the game in question, or rather there WAS one but the developer who was working on it left the company before it became anything.
So flying AI now existed through some serious head-scratching and 3D vector reasoning but were no vehicles for the flying AI to use!
A new population spawning algorithm would be needed to permit vehicles to spawn. After figuring out more possible ways how the AI could spawn, now enemies in the mod have a tiny chance to appear and attack from above, to a much more hectic experience.
It started as aircraft, then evolved to also support spaceships, then even helicopters.
The AI’s presence was hollow. It would appear every now and then as a challenge, but never really felt grounded or impactful The player could always build a base, but the vanilla AI never did that, only through pre-scripted events. Next in order was to make this AI capable of starting a base. The database of designs the AI could build from was expanded yet again with static builds, now with some community input. As players would typically build more than one structure, the AI was expanded to build more bases.
At this point, it turned out many community members liked the mod, which was originally limited to a small forum group. When the Steam Workshop opened, people wanted to see it on Steam so that they could share it with their friends! I figured out how to port the whole thing to Steam so it became accessible to many who play the game.
Since then many more updates made it to the mod.
I might use this knowledge to develop my own game later on, but until then I will continue to learn.
This pertains to a public game community on Steam and with any game it is populated with some complicated users. For more details on the subject, please contact me in person in class.