The upshot (heh) is that people didn’t know they wanted “chunky spaghetti sauce” until someone offered it on the market. Once it was offered, people *loved* it and it sold great. Before it was offered, people would simply say they wanted variations on existing products.

The toughest (but probably most rewarding) job of a game designer is giving players what they don’t even know what they want. It’s always easier to clone an existing game, as evidenced by the games available out there. But, the biggest hits that “came out of nowhere” were the ones that scratched an itch that people just didn’t know they had. On the flipside, the biggest flops were ones that predicted poorly.

At any rate, good luck with your game. If you need MMO advice, feel free to drop me a line.

We are definitely mindful of the complexities that are possible with state-based AI. One of the ways we’re hoping to reign that in is to limit the complexity of each state, and instead we’re trying for an old trick that has worked pretty well in the past: focus on making simple behaviors that will look believable to a casual observer.

We originally had some plans to have ships fly actual trade routes- they’d determine what routes were profitable and fly those. If you boarded one of those ships, they’d have the trade goods that made for a profitable route between their destinations. However, that’s a lot of work for something that’s not too noticeable.

That being said, I think goal oriented AI is really cool, and I’ve looked into it in the past, when I was back in college.

Once your ai gets more complex, your state based system will do more harm than good.
I advice you to look into Goal Oriented Action Planning, GOAP for short.
http://web.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/goap.html
More flexible and more powerful than state machines, but the biggest win is that the programmer gets to keep his sanity when things get more complex.

And yep, those are definitely outside of our ability to fix. Yay Unity… I guess I can add them to my list of 21 open bug cases (out of 38 filed).

The simplified controls always attempt to keep a constant speed in your ship’s forward direction, yup.

The simplified controls implement a more car-driving style of flight, don’t they, where turning the vehicle changes the flight direction?

I have a couple of bugs to report; not sure if they are within your jurisdiction, though. Chrome crashes consistently if I open the Unity player into a background tab (by middle-clicking on the picture above, for instance). Firefox doesn’t appear to have this problem. The mouse wheel is problematic in both. Under both browsers (Windows Vista here) the mouse wheel events go both to the window and to the Unity player, so the window scrolls as you zoom.

The initial piece is a bit of a special case, so that’s not done yet, although I made some nice progress on it today.