Will the position of the weapon on a ship affect its line of sight (cannot fire through own hull)?
When does a ship get assigned to a node? Will its node ever change?
The answer to both of these is not until the AI is smart enough to deal with it. I'd like to allow both eventually, but it ups the complexity quite a bit. restricting firing arcs should not be too hard for the AI to tolerate, but letting ships move around in formations requires quite a bit more in configuration settings and AI. Its also not really needed for the pure ship combat game, but would be necessary for more realtime systems that may come later.
What is the difference between a designated formation positions (blue) and a node?
I see the formation position for each ship, but could there be another marker (red?) for the macro-formation?
All formation positions, including those occupied by sub formations as well as ships, are marked by the blue indicators at the moment. That marks where things are trying to fly to, vs where they physically are. Color-coding the formation positions based on type is a good idea. I'v probably been using "formation node" and "formation position" interchangeably. There will be a distinction at some point in terms of how the editor works I guess, but don't worry about it, I haven't been consistent with the terminology.
Would this move the 'base' of the Fighter Pack (Formation)? By 'base' I mean the average position of the ships.
That particular stat would just effect targeting AI (focus fire on enemies doing the most damage, not those damaging you, or ones easy to hit). If the fighters were set to strongly try and stay in formation, but their sub formation was set to easily leave formation, then the whole fighter sub formations would go fly out there. The base position for a formation is not set by the average position of the ships. Is what controls where the ships go (unless they leave formation), not the other way around. There may be options to bias the formation position toward the average of the ships to help keep formations together though.
Does each Formation have its own 'base'?
Both ships and formations are instances of the "FlightNode" class, which basically represents a thing with AI that flys around. Formations however don't have to obey any physics (they can specify their position where ever they want), and the ships have to thrust around to try and get to places. You will have many (sub)formations (and ships too) and they are essentially independent except that they may/will be configured to listen to or make requests of their parent formations.
In other words, how are you going to make sure that a Formation with low 0.0 weighting on Maintain Formation priority is not going to disperse the positioning of the rest of the fleet?
Thats a downside of having a low weighting on Maintain Formation. There may be other priorities you can use to help compensate (perhaps some cross formation blobbing/flocking priorities), but having low Maintain Formation priority should have serious downsides as it wrecks your spacial organization. Setting it to 0.0 might be pretty poor strategy in most cases, but thats an issue for the player to try out.
Kiting is pretty much the basic strategy of ranged combat. It would be foolish to leave it out :)
Thanks for your comments!
I've been busy with work and haven't been making any progress lately. Its kinda hard to get excited about it when my work involves mostly the same programming languages and working with the same engine. Next in line is getting the AI system really functional, which does look pretty fun though.
