I haven’t completed any new functionality yet, but I’m working on a framework for managing automatic reactions. This is needed by anti-aircraft guns for instance, since they must be able to react immediately to defend their area effectively. Before an attacking plane is allowed to drop any bombs, all air defense units in range will get a chance to shoot it down.
To make this work I need to decouple the request for an action from actually performing the action, so that other units get a chance to intercept. When the user tries to attack an enemy unit, I now send an attack request to an arbiter object running in another (lightweight) thread. The arbiter asks enemy units nearby if they want to counter the action, and schedules the resulting actions. The schedule is then executed and the results broadcasted to everyone who can see them.
These changes not only enable automatic reactions; They also bring me closer to having networked play and fog of war (which refers to the inability to see where all the enemy’s units are).
