First off, a status update: we will not be releasing Alpha 44 this week. We will do an Alpha 43C at some point, and will aim to do Alpha 44 next week. This is due to a number of non-work factors, and we apologize for being a little out of sync. Alpha 44 will be better for it.
Business as usual.
Last time I wrote a blogpost, I noted that we were redoing the barracks to use a new user interface. Well, the interface code was written, but disabled, because we needed to set the AI to use all the new goodies (and, also, to make sure that we fix some of the long-standing military bugs that make our soldier friends less than effective.) The issue here is that we have a big block of decision tree code which should drive military decisions, as well as your hierarchy of Maslowian needs. Right now, this code doesn’t really have a unified mechanism; there is a big block of code that is hard coded for colonists which evaluates their military tree, and that’s sort of a big ugly mess. There needed to be a mechanism to evaluate a decision tree – a series of requirements and “do I succeed at this requirement or do I fail at this requirement?” decisions, which we can run through consistently and without touching the scripting system. I planned on doing this – and even blogged about it! – a few months ago, but kept putting the rewrite off because I knew it was going to be terrible, and because there we always other things that needed to be done first. Anyhow, I finally ran out of things I could meaningfully do before doing this horrible rewrite, so I finally said “ugh” and started in on it.
